Abstract
Our sense of agency, the subjective experience of controlling our actions, is a crucial component of self-awareness and motor control. It is thought to ori- ginate from the comparison between intentions and actions across broad cortical networks. However, the underlying neural mechanisms are still not fully understood. We hypothesized that oscillations in the theta-alpha range, thought to orchestrate long-range neural connectivity, may mediate sensor- imotor comparisons. To test this, we manipulated the relation between intentions and actions in a tetraplegic user of a brain machine interface (BMI), decoding primary motor cortex (M1) activity to restore hand functionality. We found that the pre-movement phase of low-alpha oscillations in M1 predicted the participant’s agency judgements. Further, using EEG-BMI in healthy parti- cipants, we found that pre-movement alpha oscillations in M1 and supple- mentary motor area (SMA) correlated with agency ratings, and with changes in their functional connectivity with parietal, temporal and prefrontal areas. These findings argue for phase-driven gating as a key mechanism for sensor- imotor integration and sense of agency.
Authors
Tommaso Bertoni, Jean-Paul Noel, Marcia Bockbrader, Carolina Foglia, Sam Colachis, Bastien Orset, Nathan Evans, Bruno Herbelin, Ali Rezai, Stefano Panzeri, Cristina Becchio, Olaf Blanke & Andrea Serino
https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3220811/v1