Separability of motor imagery of the self from interpretation of motor intentions of others at the single trial level: an EEG study.
João Andrade, José Cecílio, Marco Simões and 2 others
PMID 28651628WHAT IT FOUND
EEG signals could tell whether healthy adults imagined themselves or an avatar grasping a sphere.
Average single-trial accuracy was 67 ± 1%, and every participant was above chance. Group-level differences were not consistent after correction, and no clinical outcomes were tested.
Key findings
01All 20 EEG participants achieved above-chance single-trial classification between self and third-person motor imagery, with average accuracy of 67 ± 1%.
02After multiple-comparison correction, group-level EEG differences between the two imagery tasks were not significant, but 7 of 20 participants showed significant subject-wise differences.
03Source analysis found higher right-hemisphere activity for third-person imagery in Brodmann areas 21, 22 and 31.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Twenty healthy male adults were studied, and the ECoG data came from one epilepsy patient. The task was imagined movement without clinical outcomes or therapy. Group-level differences after correction were not significant, and results varied between participants. The authors discuss possible use for autism or BCI training, but no patients with autism were tested.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that EEG-based motor imagery training improves social cognition in autism. The study tested 20 healthy adults and one epilepsy patient, not people with autism, and it reported brain signals.