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Figure 1 | BMC Neuroscience

Figure 1

From: Differential modulation of corticospinal excitability during haptic sensing of 2-D patterns vs. textures

Figure 1

Task paradigm used to assess corticospinal excitability. A. In both discrimination tasks, participants were trained to produce a single stroking index finger movement in sync with the sound of a tone lasting for 1.8 s. In the pattern task, the finger moved over three circular stickers placed in a row, with the last circle off-set either upwards or downwards relative to the first two (3.2 mm radius, 10 mm centre-to-centre). Participants were asked to report whether the last circle was up or down. The roughness task required a judgement about the relative roughness of two grating surfaces, whose spacing between elements differed by 25%. Participants used the same stroking action to determine whether the surface presented was either the rougher (1 mm grating) or smoother (0.75 mm grating) of the two. In each trial, the TMS pulse was set to trigger 1.5s after the tone, corresponding to the time point when the finger was moving towards full abduction. B. Individual example of typical muscle activation patterns elicited in the FDI during execution of the index finger stroking action in the two tasks (right-handed male, aged 23 years). The traces represent the mean with associated SD of the rectified electromyographic (EMG) activity normalized as a percentage of the participant's maximal rectified average EMG value for all 16 trials under each task condition. C. Similar representation as in B showing the overall task-related pattern of EMG activation in all subjects (n = 18). The trace represents the mean (± SD) of all participants' normalized rectified average EMG activity level. Note the close similarity in the pattern of muscular activation between the two tasks. The amplitude of MEP's is truncated in both B and C because the scale has been adjusted to show the level of background EMG activity.

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