Isometric force complexity may not fully originate from the nervous system

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

In humans and animals, spatial and temporal information from the nervous system are translated into muscle force enabling movements of body segments. To gain deeper understanding of this translation of information into movements, we investigated the motor control dynamics of isometric contractions in children, adolescents, young adults and older adults. Twelve children, thirteen adolescents, fourteen young adults, and fifteen older adults completed two minutes of submaximal isometric plantar- and dorsiflexion. Simultaneously, sensorimotor cortex EEG, tibialis anterior and soleus EMG and plantar- and dorsiflexion force was recorded. Surrogate analysis suggested that all signals were from a deterministic origin. Multiscale entropy analysis revealed an inverted U-shape relationship between age and complexity for the force but not for the EEG and EMG signals. This suggests that temporal information in from the nervous system is modulated by the musculoskeletal system during the transmission into force. The entropic half-life analyses indicated that this modulation increases the time scale of the temporal dependency in the force signal compared to the neural signals. Together this indicates that the information embedded in produced force does not exclusively reflect the information embedded in the underlying neural signal.

Original languageEnglish
Article number103111
JournalHuman Movement Science
Volume90
Number of pages13
ISSN0167-9457
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Science - Isometric force, Nonlinear dynamics, Neural activity, Motor control

ID: 357730875