Effect of task failure on intermuscular coherence measures in synergistic muscles
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Published version
Author(s)
Castronovo, Anna Margherita
De Marchis, Cristiano
Schmid, Maurizio
Conforto, Silvia
Severini, Giacomo
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The term "task failure" describes the point when a person is not able to maintain the level of force required by a task. As task failure approaches, the corticospinal command to the muscles increases to maintain the required level of force in the face of a decreased mechanical efficacy. Nevertheless, most motor tasks require the synergistic recruitment of several muscles. How this recruitment is affected by approaching task failure is still not clear. The increase in the corticospinal drive could be due to an increase in synergistic recruitment or to overlapping commands sent to the muscles individually. Herein, we investigated these possibilities by combining intermuscular coherence and synergy analysis on signals recorded from three muscles of the quadriceps during dynamic leg extension tasks. We employed muscle synergy analysis to investigate changes in the coactivation of the muscles. Three different measures of coherence were used. Pooled coherence was used to estimate the command synchronous to all three muscles, pairwise coherence the command shared across muscle pairs and residual coherence the command peculiar to each couple of muscles. Our analysis highlights an overall decrease in synergistic command at task failure and an intensification of the contribution of the nonsynergistic shared command.
Date Issued
2018-06-03
Date Acceptance
2018-02-21
Citation
Applied Bionics and Biomechanics, 2018, 2018
ISSN
1176-2322
Publisher
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Journal / Book Title
Applied Bionics and Biomechanics
Volume
2018
Copyright Statement
© 2018 Anna Margherita Castronovo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29967654
Subjects
0903 Biomedical Engineering
0913 Mechanical Engineering
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
Egypt
Article Number
4759232