Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club with Professor Freek van Ede, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, NL

The Cognitive Neuroscience Club is hosting monthly seminars on the topic Cognitive Neuroscience. On Tuesday 28 May 2024, we welcome Professor Freek van Ede, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

Abstract

I will start my talk by showing how anticipating a task-relevant somatosensory input at the hand is associated with a selective attenuation of 8-30 Hz alpha- and beta activity in the contralateral somatosensory cortex. I will show how this phenomenon tunes-in to the time at which a touch stimulus is expected and how its orienting time course matches the time course of attentional facilitation in touch accuracy. I will go on to show how prior anticipation may increase ensuing recruitment of the ipsilateral somatosensory cortex, putatively increasing the distribution of somatosensory processing. I will show how attenuated alpha/beta activity also tracks working-memory retention of touch, and how alpha/beta attenuation is replaced by the contralateral amplification of gamma oscillations during the selective processing of a continuous somatosensory input stream. I will finally turn to two relevant properties of somato-motor beta activity. First, I will show how the attenuation of beta activity is not limited to the somatosensory system, but propagates all the way down to the forearm muscles – even when no manual response is required. Second, I will show how somato-motor beta activity is best thought of as transient bursts, rather than amplitude-varying sustained oscillations – even during sustained somato-motor demands. Collectively, these findings portray the status of the field of MEG studies on brain oscillations in the somato-motor system through the aged lens of my PhD research.