Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
Motor imagery training and verbal semantic processing. A TMS-EEG study
Poster A22 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Mariam Bayram1, Richard Palluel-Germain1, Sylvain Harquel2, Marcela Perrone-Bertolotti1; 1Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, LPNC, 38000 Grenoble, France., 2Defitech Chair of Clinical Neuroengineering, Center for Neuroprosthetics (CNP) and Brain Mind Institute (BMI), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Campus Biotech, Chemin des Mines 9, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland.
In the present preregistered study, we investigated the implication of motor system training in semantic processing. Specifically, we proposed that motor imagery (MI) training activates the motor system similarly to physical execution and recruits higher-order representations of action concepts. MI can be considered as a simulation process that may lead to neuroplastic changes in the motor system and open new avenues for language rehabilitation (Bayram et al., 2023). We proposed a TMS-EEG experiment with two groups of participants: Kinesthetic MI of upper-limb actions (KMI) and Visual Imagery (VI) training group. Each participant performed a semantic categorization task (SC) (abstract vs action verb) in two different stimulation sessions: Verum and realistic Sham. In the Verum session, participants’ right-hand motor area was stimulated subthreshold (i.e., without inducing any hand muscle contraction), in four blocks of 70 stimulations delivered at 0 ms, 200 ms (early stages of semantic processing), or 400 ms (post-semantic processing stages) after verb onset in the SC task. Preliminary behavioral results using linear mixed models in terms of response times (RTs) of 10 participants with TMS-0ms stimulation revealed no significant difference in the KMI group between Sham and Verum stimulation, while shorter RTs were observed in the VI group in the Verum stimulation. The longer RT observed in the KMI compared to VI training in Verum stimulation suggests that motor training before stimulation may have disrupted the stimulation’s facilitatory effects on semantic processing. Furthermore, the stimulation condition differentially affected RTs of abstract and action verbs, similarly in KMI and VI: action verbs were processed faster than abstract verbs, in which verum stimulation led to a larger difference in RTs between abstract and action verbs, suggesting that the facilitatory effect of stimulating M1 is more substantial for action verbs. The spatiotemporal patterns analyses of the TMS-Evoked Potentials using EEG data will allow us to identify the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying behavioral effects. We expect EEG results to reveal how and when semantic access and integration will be affected depending on the manipulated variables. Results will be discussed in line with the literature on the interaction between the motor and the language systems.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,