Neural and behavioral dynamics of timing processing in subcortical lesion patients

Poster Session E - Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Antonio Criscuolo¹ (a.criscuolo@maastrichtuniversity.nl), Michael Schwartze¹, Sylvie Nozaradan², Sonja Kotz^1,3; ¹Maastricht University, ²Institute of Neuroscience (IONS), Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Brussels, Belgium, ³Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

The capacities to encode the precise timing of sensory events, and to time our own (re-)actions are pivotal to act and adapt to a dynamically changing environment. The basal ganglia (BG) and the cerebellum (CE) are part of a cortico-subcortical network engaged in timing and rhythm processing. While the CE encodes the precise timing of sensory stimuli, the BG generates temporal predictions. What happens when either of these two brain regions are lesioned? In this study, we recruited healthy controls (HC) and stroke patients with lesions in either the BG or CE. After delineating patient’s lesion locations upon their anatomical MRIs, we individually quantified the lesion extension and the group-level overlap. Next, we combined evidence from an EEG and behavioral experiment to investigate the causal role of BG and CE in the sensory and sensorimotor mechanisms of temporal processing. In a tapping synchronization task, participants were asked to tap along with temporally regular auditory sequences presented at three increasing speeds. In the EEG experiment, participants passively listened to isochronous auditory sequences. Comprehensive within- and between-group analyses assessed individual and trial-level neural and tapping dynamics while processing and synchronizing with the temporal regularity in auditory streams. For both data we characterized instantaneous frequency, acceleration, stability, phase coherence and entropy. Combined results from the EEG and the behavioral experiments demonstrated that BG and CE lesions causally impacted the precise neurophysiological encoding of the rhythm and further affected the abilities to produce and synchronize behavior to temporally regular stimuli.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition