Changes in arrhythmic broadband components of neural activity during voluntary movement are not sufficiently investigated. In our previous work we demonstrated that broadband electroencephalography (EEG) contains long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) that show ongoing changes over short timescales during voluntary movement [1]. We characterised broadband LRTCs using detrended fluctuation analysis and modelled short- and long-range correlations using autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) model which can robustly detect movement intention prior to its onset [2]. We found that broadband LRTCs are complementary to event-related desynchronisation and conventional LRTCs typically observed in alpha oscillation amplitude envelope, thus discovering a new neural correlate of movement. Here, we demonstrate that broadband LRTCs can be ubiquitously observed in neural activity recorded at different scales from mesoscopic EEG to microscopic multi-unit neural activity and local-field potentials (LFPs). By applying our broadband LRTC analysis on LFP and spiking activity from publicly available intracortical neural data [3,4], we observed ongoing changes in broadband LRTCs similar to EEG during voluntary movement on short timescales of 0.2-0.5 s. We were able to detect movement intention 1 s prior to its onset with accuracies of 95.12 ± 1.06% on single trials in intracortical neural activity. Thus, broadband LRTC is a fundamental property of neuronal dynamics at different scales. Additionally, we show another application of broadband LRTC by using ARFIMA model to simulate realistic broadband EEG trials during voluntary movement. This simulated EEG showed complementary neural correlates of movement including event-related desynchronisation and motor-related cortical potentials which were not explicitly modelled, further indicating that broadband short- and long-range correlations modelled by ARFIMA encompass fundamental properties of EEG and can be used to study motor-related changes.
References
[1] M Wairagkar, Y Hayashi, SJ Nasuto, “Dynamics of long-range temporal correlations in broadband EEG during different motor execution and imagery tasks”, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 660032, 2021.
[2] M Wairagkar, Y Hayashi, SJ Nasuto, “Modeling the ongoing dynamics of short and long-range temporal correlations in broadband EEG during movement”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 13, p.66, 2019.
[3] T Brochier, L Zehl, Y Hao, et al., “Massively parallel recordings in macaque motor cortex during an instructed delayed reach-to-grasp task”, Scientific data, 5 (1), 2018.
[4] FR Willett, DT Avansino, LR Hochberg, et al., “High-performance brain-to-text communication via handwriting”, Nature, 593(7858), p.249-254, 2021.