Functional coupling of human right and left cortical motor areas demonstrated with partial coherence analysis

Although a linear correlation between oscillatory activities in the right and left motor cortices during movements has been shown in monkeys, there has been a debate whether scalp-recorded EEG coherence in human reflects a similar association. By applying partial coherence analysis, we demonstrated that interhemispheric coherence during movements cannot be explained by contamination from the occipital alpha rhythm or common reference signal. A significant increase of net interhemispheric communication in the beta1 band was shown during movements. We propose that the partial coherence method can be a useful tool to measure cortico-cortical functional coupling reliably.