Effect of the interstimulus interval in the kinematics of the finger movement during a finger tapping task

RIERA, PABLO E.; SPIOUSAS, IGNACIO; LAJE, RODRIGO

Mar Del Plata

Congreso; XXX Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigacion en Neurociencias. Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires; 2015

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

When humans synchronize to an external periodic stimulus the brain has to interpret afferentinformation from sensory organs (e.g. eyes, ears) in order to execute a motor task that iscoordinated with the stimulus. In this work we concentrate in the motor side of the problem andexplore the kinematics of the finger movement during a finger tapping task under a sensorimotorsynchronization paradigm. We want to investigate the effect of the tempo of the sequence on thetrajectory of the finger, and for that we performed a finger tapping experiment where the taskconsisted of tapping on a force sensor with the index finger, synchronizing this taps with a periodicisochronous auditory stimulus (short tones of 50 ms duration and a pitch of 440 Hz). The kinematicswere studied by means of a digital accelerometer attached to the finger. We find that when thefinger raises, the magnitude of the acceleration and the rising time depends on the tempo. For slowtempos the time trace of the finger?s acceleration remains mostly invariant and independent of thestimulus period, but as the tempo increases and gets closer to the synchronization rate limit, thefinger raises earlier and with a higher acceleration