| Popis: |
Humans perceive and synchronize to regularity in auditory temporal sequences. Auditory regularity activates motor areas, but how the timing of motor responses relates to the regularity is unclear. Thus, we examined whether motor excitability, an index of motor activity, fluctuated to an isochronous sequence and characterized the timing of these fluctuations. Participants heard isochronous tones followed by a short silence, during which they imagined the tones continuing. Using single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we indexed excitability throughout the sequence. Cosine models were fit to constructed excitability timecourses to quantify periodicity of the excitability fluctuations. Motor excitability did not fluctuate at the stimulus frequency during either listening or silent portions. Thus, the study does not provide evidence for motor excitability fluctuations during isochronous tone perception or generation. Future work may reduce measurement noise by acquiring more samples over a shorter time or using a more engaging stimulus. |
