JoVE Logo

Sign In

Abstract

Neuroscience

A Visuospatial Planning Task Coupled with Eye-Tracker and Electroencephalogram Systems

Published: March 3rd, 2023

DOI:

10.3791/64622

1Laboratorio de Neurociencia Cognitiva, Escuela de Psicología, Universidad Católica del Norte, 2Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 3Neurodynamics of Cognition Laboratory, Departamento de Psiquiatría, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 4Instituto de Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad de O’Higgins, 5Instituto de Ciencias de la Ingeniería, Universidad de O’Higgins, 6Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital of Saint-Etienne, 7Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, LPNC, 8Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)

Abstract

The planning process, characterized by the capability to formulate an organized plan to reach a goal, is essential for human goal-directed behavior. Since planning is compromised in several neuropsychiatric disorders, the implementation of proper clinical and experimental tests to examine planning is critical. Due to the nature of the deployment of planning, in which several cognitive domains participate, the assessment of planning and the design of behavioral paradigms coupled with neuroimaging methods are current challenges in cognitive neuroscience. A planning task was evaluated in combination with an electroencephalogram (EEG) system and eye movement recordings in 27 healthy adult participants. Planning can be separated into two stages: a mental planning stage in which a sequence of steps is internally represented and an execution stage in which motor action is used to achieve a previously planned goal. Our protocol included a planning task and a control task. The planning task involved solving 36 maze trials, each representing a zoo map. The task had four periods: i) planning, where the subjects were instructed to plan a path to visit the locations of four animals according to a set of rules; ii) maintenance, where the subjects had to retain the planned path in their working memory; iii) execution, where the subjects used eye movements to trace the previously planned path as indicated by the eye-tracker system; and iv) response, where the subjects reported the order of the visited animals. The control task had a similar structure, but the cognitive planning component was removed by modifying the task goal. The spatial and temporal patterns of the EEG revealed that planning induces a gradual and lasting rise in frontal-midline theta activity (FMθ) over time. The source of this activity was identified within the prefrontal cortex by source analyses. Our results suggested that the experimental paradigm combining EEG and eye-tracker systems was optimal for evaluating cognitive planning.

Explore More Videos

Keywords Visuospatial Planning

This article has been published

Video Coming Soon

JoVE Logo

Privacy

Terms of Use

Policies

Research

Education

ABOUT JoVE

Copyright © 2024 MyJoVE Corporation. All rights reserved