Event-related potentials during finger tapping task

M. L. BAVASSI; J. E. KAMIENKOWSKI; M. SIGMAN; R. LAJE

Córdoba, Argentina

Congreso; 2nd Joint Meeting of the Argentine Society for Neuroscience and the Argentine Workshop in Neuroscience; 2010

Finger tapping to a metronome is a paradigmatic task in sensorimotor synchronization, the specifically human ability to entrain movement to an external periodic stimulus. In this task the subject is instructed to tap in synchrony with a periodic sequence of brief tones, and the time difference (asynchrony) between each stimulus and its corresponding response is recorded. Despite being a very simple, spontaneous, and robust behavior in humans, finger tapping involves the superposition of several distinct systems like time perception, comparison, error correction and motor execution. With the aim of disentangling these overlapped contributions, we recorded high-density EEG event-related potentials and the concurrent behavioral asynchronies during a finger tapping task. We have found a) high bilateral activation in fronto-central sources around 100 ms before tapping; b) lower levels of activity in motor cortex but correlated with the observed asynchronies; and c) a fronto-central mismatch negativity after large negative asynchronies.