The occurrence patterns of brain wave components in a timing control task

Abstract

  In order to reveal the brain wave components and the cerebral cortex area related to control of timing, we examined the occurrence patterns of brain wave components in the cerebral cortex of human subjects during a timing control task. The subjects were six healthy adults. All subjects were right-handed. We used two tasks, one was a smooth pursuit eye movement task as the control task, and the other was a coincidence anticipation timing task as the timing task. Both tasks were carried out from a computer display placed approximately 1.3m away from the subject. An electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from electrodes placed at 128 sites on the scalp. The EEG was separated to in frequency bands of an alpha component and a beta component by FFT analysis and then analyzed. In addition, the alpha component and the beta component were compared respectively in 18 sites according to the international 10/20 system without Cz between the control task and the timing task.

  In the timing task, we observed a decrease of the alpha component and an increase of the beta component in specific areas related to the task. Then, we observed that the areas where the beta component increased was in the bilateral visual areas, the left parietal area, the left motor area and the frontal area. These results suggest that in human subjects, information processing in the cerebral cortex is done in the beta component and timing by a visual stimulus is controlled by the visual, parietal, motor and frontal areas.