Activation of the Brain During Motor Imagination Task with Auditory Stimulation

Background: Auditory feedback is one of the most important feedback in cognitive process. It plays an important guiding role in cognitive motor process. However, previous studies on auditory stimuli mainly focused on the cognitive effects of auditory stimuli on cortex, while the role of auditory feedback stimuli in motor imagery tasks is still unclear.Methods: 18 healthy subjects were recruited to complete the motor imagination task stimulated by meaningful words and meaningless words. In order to explore the role of auditory stimuli in motor imagination tasks, we studied EEG power spectrum, frontal parietal mismatch negativity (MMN) and inter test phase-locked consistency (ITPC). one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Least Significant Difference (LSD) correction were used to test the differences between the two experimental groups and the differences of different bands in each experimental group.Results: EEG power spectrum analysis showed that the activity of contralateral motor cortex was significantly increased under the stimulation of meaningful words, and the amplitude of mismatch negative wave was also significantly increased. ITPC is mainly concentrated in μ, α and γ bands in the process of motor imagery task guided by the auditory stimulus of meaningful words, while it is mainly concentrated in the β band under the meaningless words stimulation.Conclusions: This results may be due to the influence of auditory cognitive process on motor imagery. We speculate that there may be a more complex mechanism for the effect of auditory stimulation on the inter test phase lock consistency. When the stimulus sound has the corresponding meaning to the motor action, the parietal motor cortex may be more affected by the prefrontal cognitive cortex, thus changing its normal response mode. This mode change is caused by the joint action of motor imagination, cognitive and auditory stimuli. This study provides a new insight into the neural mechanism of motor imagery task guided by auditory stimuli, and provides more information on the activity characteristics of the brain network in motor imagery task by cognitive auditory feedback.