Cortical sources of electroencephalographic alpha rhythms related to the anticipation and experience of mirror visual feedback-induced illusion of finger movements

Abstract

Mirror visual feedback (MVF) technique consists in placing a mirror in a person's body midline to induce the illusion of bilateral synchronous movements of the limbs during actual unilateral movements. A recent electroencephalographical (EEG) study demonstrated that MVF-induced illusion was related to the event-related desynchronization (ERD) of alpha (8–12 Hz) rhythms (cortical activation) at the central and parietal scalp electrodes ipsilateral to the unilateral right finger movements. In the present study, we re-analyzed those data to localize the cortical sources of alpha ERD during the anticipation and experience of the MVF-induced illusion of index finger movements. To this aim, the exact Low-Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography freeware was used for the estimation of the cortical sources of the alpha ERD. Results showed that as compared to the condition without MVF, the MVF condition was characterized by greater (p