Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

Recent studies, based on Local Field Potentials and source activity reconstruction from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, conducted in animals and healthy individuals reported a power increase in the frequency range of 3-5 Hz over the cortical motor areas that accompanies the preparatory phase of movement. Such low frequency oscillations (LFOs) detected in the EEG of post-stroke patients under the same condition have been reported to show lower magnitude peak. In this work we investigate the LFOs activity in a sample of healthy participants performing the grasping and finger extension tasks with both hands separately. To characterize the LFOs in terms of temporal occurrence, we introduce a single-trial alignment around the LFOs peak. We also compared the tasks to determine if there are differences related to hand dominance and/or the type of task proposed. Our results suggest that there is a jitter in the occurrence of the LFOs power peak and that the side and the type of the experimental task have no influence on the LFOs activity.