Effects of Motor Tempo on Frontal Brain Activity: An fNIRS Study

People are able to modify the spontaneous pace of their actions to interact with their environment and others. This ability is underpinned by high-level cognitive functions but little is known in regard to the brain areas that underlie such temporal control. A salient practical issue is that current neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG, fMRI) are extremely sensitive to movement, which renders challenging any investigation of brain activity in the realm of whole-body motor paradigms. Within the last decade, the noninvasive imaging method of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has become the reference tool for experimental motor paradigms due to its tolerance to motion artefacts. In the present study, we used a continuous-wave fNIRS system to record the prefrontal and motor hemodynamic responses of 16 participants, while they performed a spatial-tapping task varying in motor complexity and externally-paced tempi (i.e., 300 ms, 500 ms, 1200 ms). To discriminate between physiological noise and cerebral meaningful signals, the physiological data (i.e., heart and respiratory rates) were recorded so that frequency bands of such signals could be regressed from the fNIRS data. Particular attention was taken to control the precise position of the optodes in reference to the cranio-cerebral correlates of the NIR channels throughout the experimental session. Results indicated that fast pacing relied on greater activity of the motor areas whereas moving at close-to-spontaneous pace placed a heavier load on posterior prefrontal processes. These results provide new insight concerning the role of frontal cognitive control in modulating the pacing of voluntary motor behaviors.