Douglas Cheyne

• BSc Waterloo, PhD SFU
• Professor at University of Toronto

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is conceived as an impairment of the central motor system’s ability to program multiple speech movements, resulting in inaccurate transitions between and relative timing across speech sounds. However, the extant neuroimaging evidence base is scant and inconclusive and the neurophysiological origins of these motor p...

Movement planning processes must account for body posture to accurately convert sensory signals into movement plans. While movement plans can be computed relative to the world (extrinsic), intrinsic muscle commands tuned for current limb posture are ultimately needed to execute spatially accurate movements. The whole-brain topology and dynamics of...

Many decades after Penfield’s (1937) classic depiction of the motor homunculus, it remains unclear how spatially contiguous and interconnected representations within human sensorimotor cortex might separate their activities to achieve the directed and precise control of distinct body regions evident in activities as different as typing and speaking...

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is conceived as an impairment of the central motor system’s ability to program multiple speech movements, resulting in inaccurate transitions between and relative timing across speech sounds. However, the extant neuroimaging evidence base is scant and inconclusive and the neurophysiological origins of these motor p...

Introduction Articulography and functional neuroimaging are two major tools for studying the neurobiology of speech production. Until now, however, it has generally not been feasible to use both in the same experimental setup because of technical incompatibilities between the two methodologies. Methods Here we describe results from a novel articul...

Neuroimaging protocols for mapping of expressive speech centres employ several standard speech tasks including object naming, rhyming, and covert word production (Agarwal et al., 2019). These tasks reliably elicit activation of distributed speech centres in prefrontal, precentral and cingulate motor cortices and are widely used for presurgical mapp...

Articulography and functional neuroimaging are two major tools for studying the neurobiology of speech production. Until now, however, it has generally not been feasible to use both in the same experimental setup because of technical incompatibilities between the two methodologies. Here we describe results from a novel articulography system dubbed...

To generate a hand-specific reach plan, the brain must integrate hand-specific signals with the desired movement strategy. Although various neurophysiology / imaging studies have investigated hand-target interactions in simple reach-to-target tasks, the whole-brain timing and distribution of this process remain unclear, especially for more complex,...

Articulography and functional neuroimaging are two major tools for studying the neurobiology of speech production. Until recently, however, it has generally not been possible to use both in the same experimental setup because of technical incompatibilities between the two methodologies. Here we describe results from a novel articulography system du...

To generate a hand-specific reach plan, the brain must integrate hand-specific signals with the desired movement strategy. Although various neurophysiology / imaging studies have investigated hand-target interactions in simple reach-to-target tasks, the whole-brain timing and distribution of this process remain unclear, especially for more complex,...

Background: Dystonia is one of the most common movement disorders after pediatric basal ganglia stroke, causing significant disability. It presents several months post stroke suggesting a role of maladaptive neuroplasticity in its manifestation. Children with dystonia show additional difficulties in intelligence (IQ), academics, and cognitive inhib...

Cognitive control of action is associated with conscious effort and is hypothesised to be reflected by increased frontal theta activity. However, the functional role of these increases in theta power, and how they contribute to cognitive control remains unknown. We conducted an MEG study to test the hypothesis that frontal theta oscillations intera...

Background Children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP) experience upper limb somatosensory and motor deficits. While constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) improves motor function, its impact on somatosensory function remains under-investigated. Objective To evaluate somatosensory perception and related brain responses in children with HCP,...

Purpose The planning and execution of motor behaviors require coordination of neurons that are established through synchronization of neural activity. Movements are typically preceded by event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the beta range (15–30 Hz) primarily localized in the motor cortex, while movement onset is associated with event-related s...

The basal ganglia-thalamocortical (BGTC) loop may underlie speech deficits in developmental stuttering. In this study, we investigated the relationship between abnormal cortical neural oscillations and structural integrity alterations in adults who stutter (AWS) using a novel magnetoencephalography (MEG) guided tractography approach. Beta oscillati...

Hippocampal rhythms are important for spatial navigation. This study examined whether gender differences in human navigation performance are associated with differences in hippocampal rhythms. We measured brain activities in males and females with whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG), while they performed a virtual Morris water maze task. Behavi...

Recent evidence shows that hippocampal theta oscillations, usually linked to memory and navigation, are also observed during online language processing, suggesting a shared neurophysiological mechanism between language and memory. However, it remains to be established what specific roles hippocampal theta oscillations may play in language, and whet...

Articulography and functional neuroimaging are two major tools for studying the neurobiology of speech production. Until now, however, it has generally not been possible to use both in the same experimental setup because of technical incompatibilities between the two methodologies. Here we describe results from a novel articulography system dubbed...

Our ability to control and inhibit automatic behaviors is crucial for negotiating complex environments, all of which require rapid communication between sensory, motor, and cognitive networks. Here, we measured neuromagnetic brain activity to investigate the neural timing of cortical areas needed for inhibitory control, while 14 healthy young adult...

In a previous study we reported the first measurements of pre-movement and sensorimotor cortex activity in preschool age children (ages 3-5 years) using a customized paediatric MEG system. Movement-related activity in the sensorimotor cortex differed from that typically observed in adults, suggesting that maturation of cortical motor networks was s...

Cognitive control of behavior is often accompanied by theta-band activity in the frontal cortex, and is crucial for overriding habits and producing desired actions. However, the functional role of theta activity in controlled behavior remains to be determined. Here, we used a behavioral task (Isabella et al., 2019) that covertly manipulated the abi...

Movement planning involves transforming the sensory signals into a command in motor coordinates. Surprisingly, the real-time dynamics of sensorimotor transformations at the whole brain level remain unknown, in part due to the spatiotemporal limitations of fMRI and neurophysiological recordings. Here, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG)during pro-/...

ADHD is associated with altered dopamine regulated reinforcement learning on prediction errors. Despite evidence of categorically altered error processing in ADHD, neuroimaging advances have largely investigated models of normal reinforcement learning in greater detail. Further, although reinforcement leaning critically relies on ventral striatum e...

Confirmatory analysis of raphe nucleus seed location. Whole brain corrected correlations (red/yellow = positive, blue = negative correlation) with raphe nucleus seed during post-error slowing in the same regions and direction (positive/negative) as in [45]. Correlations were weaker or absent in ADHD except in anterior insula, where correlations wer...

Seed activities related to Table 1. (A) Deactivation of dorsal striatum in TD adolescents during error detection (TD Detect). (B) Deactivation of ventral pallidum in TD during post-error slowing (TD PES). (C) Activation of substantia nigra in TD during post-error slowing (TD PES). (D) Deactivation of raphe nucleus in TD adolescents during post-erro...

Correlations in replication sample from Table 7. (A) Correlation of dorsal striatum (DS) during error detection (Detect) with response-phase (Go) activities in right middle frontal gyrus (R MFG) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL). (B) Correlation of ventral pallidum with dorsal pallidum and substantia nigra (SN) during post-error slowing (PES). (C)...

Confirmatory analysis of SN seed location. Whole brain corrected correlations (red/yellow = positive, blue = negative correlation) with SN seed during post-error slowing. In TD, SN correlated with bilateral limbic, striatal and neocortical regions, consistent with known ascending DA pathways. ADHD showed stronger correlations in posterior networks...

Correlations with dorsal striatum and ventral pallidum related to Table 2. (A) Correlations of dorsal striatum during error detection with right middle frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule during response-phases. (B) Correlations of ventral pallidum with dorsal pallidum, substantia nigra and amygdala during error detection. Correlation maps p...

Correlations with substantia nigra related to Table 3. Correlation of substantia nigra during error detection with response-phase (A) and with error detection maps (B). Correlation of substantia nigra during post-error slowing with post-error slowing (C) and response-phase (D) maps. Correlation maps portray B1 estimates after whole brain correction...

Correlations with raphe nucleus from Table 4, with LC from Table 5, and with medial septal nuclei from Table 6. (A) Correlation of raphe nucleus during post-error slowing with post-error slowing (A) and response-phase maps (B). Correlation of locus coeruleus activity during post-error with post-error slowing (C) and with response-phase maps (D). Co...

Aim To report clinical outcomes and evidence of corneal innervation in patients with neurotrophic keratopathy (NK) treated with minimally invasive corneal neurotisation (MICN) using a sural nerve graft and donor sensory nerves from the face. Methods Patients undergoing MICN at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada were prospectively recr...

In previous studies we have provided evidence that performance in speeded response tasks with infrequent target stimuli reflects both automatic and controlled cognitive processes, based on differences in reaction time (RT) and task-related brain responses (Cheyne et al. 2012, Isabella et al. 2015). Here we test the hypothesis that such shifts in co...

In a previous MEG study of movement-related brain activity in preschool age children, we reported that pre-movement fields and sensorimotor cortex oscillations differed from those typically observed in adults, suggesting that maturation of cortical motor networks is still incomplete by late preschool age (Cheyne et al., 2014). Here we describe the...

Brain imaging research has revealed important functional and structural differences between the brains for people who stutter and typically fluent speakers. These differences have allowed researchers to better understand the onset and development of stuttering in children and adults. However, until recently it has been difficult if not impossible f...

ADHD is associated with altered dopamine regulated reinforcement learning on prediction errors. Despite evidence of categorically altered error processing in ADHD, neuroimaging advances have largely investigated models of normal reinforcement learning in greater detail. Further, although reinforcement leaning critically relies on ventral striatum e...

BrainWave is an easy-to-use Matlab toolbox for the analysis of magnetoencephalography data. It provides a graphical user interface for performing minimum-variance beamforming analysis with rapid and interactive visualization of evoked and induced brain activity. This article provides an overview of the main features of BrainWave with a step-by-step...

In rodents, hippocampal cell assemblies formed during learning of a navigation task are observed to re-emerge during resting (offline) periods, accompanied by high-frequency oscillations (HFOs). This phenomenon is believed to reflect mechanisms for strengthening newly-formed memory traces. Using magnetoencephalography recordings and a beamforming s...

Hippocampal rhythms are believed to support crucial cognitive processes including memory, navigation, and language. Due to the location of the hippocampus deep in the brain, studying hippocampal rhythms using non-invasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings has generally been assumed to be methodologically challenging. However, with the advent...

Planning an accurate reach involves the transformation of the neural representation of target location in sensory coordinates into a command for hand motion in motor coordinates. Although imaging techniques such as fMRI reveal the cortical topography of such transformations, and neurophysiological recordings provide local dynamics, we do not yet kn...

In rodents, hippocampal cell assemblies formed during learning of a navigation task are observed to re-emerge during resting (offline) periods, accompanied by high-frequency oscillations (HFOs). This phenomenon is believed to reflect mechanisms for strengthening newly-formed memory traces. Using magnetoencephalography recordings and a beamforming s...

Purpose: Recent literature on speech production in adults who stutter (AWS) has begun to investigate the neural mechanisms characterizing speech-motor preparation prior to speech onset. Compelling evidence has suggested that stuttering is associated with atypical processing within cortical and sub-cortical motor networks, particularly in the beta...

Low frequency theta band oscillations (4-8 Hz) are thought to provide a timing mechanism for hippocampal place cell firing and to mediate the formation of spatial memory. In rodents, hippocampal theta has been shown to play an important role in encoding a new environment during spatial navigation, but a similar functional role of hippocampal theta...

Low frequency theta band oscillations (4–8 Hz) are thought to provide a timing mechanism for hippocampal place cell firing and to mediate the formation of spatial memory. In rodents, hippocampal theta has been shown to play an important role in encoding a new environment during spatial navigation, but a similar functional role of hippocampal theta...

Adults who stutter (AWS) have demonstrated atypical coordination of motor and sensory regions during speech production. Yet little is known of the speech-motor network in AWS in the brief time window preceding audible speech onset. The purpose of the current study was to characterize neural oscillations in the speech-motor network during preparatio...

The short-term retention of tactile information is less studied than the visual and auditory modalities. Using load-dependent changes in brain responses measured with magnetoencephalography, we explored the areas likely involved in the retention of tactile patterns on the hand, in different time windows during the retention interval of a simple mem...

Objective: We describe a novel motion tracking system, called MASK (Magnetoarticulography for the Assessment of Speech Kinematics) designed to track detailed orofacial movements during magnetoencephalographic (MEG) measures of human brain activity. A three-dimensional electromagnetic tracking method was employed using lightweight coils energized w...

Often we must balance being prepared to act quickly with being prepared to suddenly stop. The stop signal task (SST) is widely used to study inhibitory control, and provides a measure of the speed of the stop process that is robust to changes in subjects' response strategy. Previous studies have shown that preparation affects inhibition. We used fM...

BACKGROUND Children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP) experience upper limb sensory processing and motor deficits. Current interventions focus on motor deficits while sensory impairments are overlooked. Movement and sensation are intimately related and theories on motor behavior support addressing both. While constraint-induced movement therapy...

We examined sensorimotor brain activity associated with voluntary movements in preschool children using a customized pediatric MEG system. A videogame-like task was used to generate self-initiated right or left index finger movements in seventeen healthy right-handed subjects (8 female, ages 3.2 to 4.8 years). We successfully identified spatiotempo...

Objective: To assess the reliability of MEG source imaging (MSI) of anterior temporal spikes through detailed analysis of the localization and orientation of source solutions obtained for a large number of spikes that were separately confirmed by intracranial EEG to be focally generated within a single, well-characterized spike focus. Methods: MSI...

Objective: To assess the reliability and validity of EEG source localization of anterior temporal lobe spikes through direct comparison with simultaneously recorded intracranial spike fields. Methods: We recently showed that classical anterior temporal spikes recorded in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) are non-propagated potentials generated i...

The human motor cortex exhibits transient bursts of high frequency gamma oscillations in the 60–90 Hz range during movement. It has been proposed that gamma oscillations generally reflect local intracortical activity. However, movement-evoked gamma is observed simultaneously in both cortical and subcortical (basal ganglia) structures and thus appea...

This commentary is on the original article by Juenger et al. on pages of this issue.

In this paper we propose an agglomerative hierarchical clustering Ward's algorithm in tandem with the Affinity Propagation algorithm to reliably localize active brain regions from magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain signals. Reliable localization of brain areas with MEG has been difficult due to variations in signal strength, and the spatial extent...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the utility of an event-related beamforming (ERB) algorithm in source localization of interictal discharges. METHODS: We analyzed interictal magnetoencephalography data in 35 children with intractable neocortical epilepsy. We used a spatiotemporal beamforming method to estimate the spatial distribution of source power in indi...

Objective: To assess whether existing noninvasive source localization techniques can provide valid solutions for large extended cortical sources we tested the capability of various methods of EEG source imaging (ESI) and magnetic source imaging (MSI) to localize the large superficial cortical generator of the human K-complex. Methods: We recentl...

The human sensorimotor cortex demonstrates a variety of oscillatory activity that is strongly modulated by movement and somatosensory input. Studies using scalp EEG and intracranial electrical recordings have provided much of our current knowledge regarding the frequency and temporal specificity of these sensorimotor rhythms and their relationship...

In a recent MEG study, we found that the ability to switch motor responses to infrequent targets in a rapidly presented stream of digits (switch task) was associated with increased right frontal theta activity prior to movement and early motor preparation reflected by decreases in beta oscillations in motor cortex (Cheyne et al., submitted). We int...

Neuromagnetic source reconstruction based on the minimum-variance beamformer algorithm has become an increasingly popular method for the localization of brain activity from MEG data. We present a Matlab-based toolbox (BrainWave - Beamformer Reconstruction And INteractive WAveform Visualization Environment) that provides a user-friendly graphical us...

We used whole-head magnetoencephalography to investigate cortical activity during two oromotor activities foundational to speech production. 13 adults performed mouth opening and phoneme (/pa/) production tasks to a visual cue. Jaw movements were tracked with an ultrasound-emitting device. Trials were time-locked to both stimulus onset and peak of...

Human action involves a combination of controlled and automatic behavior. These processes may interact in tasks requiring rapid response selection or inhibition, where temporal constraints preclude timely intervention by conscious, controlled processes over automatized prepotent responses. Such contexts tend to produce frequent errors, but also rap...

Purpose: We studied the relationship between source localization of interictal discharges using an event-related beamformer (ERB), equivalent current dipole analysis and the ictal onset zone on intracranial video EEG (IVEEG). Methods: We acquired interictal MEG data using a whole-head 151channel gradiometer system in 35 children with intractable ne...

Top-down voluntary attention modulates the amplitude of magnetic evoked fields in the human visual cortex. Whether such modulation is flexible enough to adapt to the demands of complex tasks in which abstract rules must be applied to select a target in the presence of distracters remains unclear. We recorded brain neuromagnetic activity using whole...

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) source analysis has largely relied on spherical conductor models of the head to simplify forward calculations of the brain's magnetic field. Multiple- (or overlapping, local) sphere models, where an optimal sphere is selected for each sensor, are considered an improvement over single-sphere models and are computationall...

Goal: We used whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate neural areas involved in two simple oromotor activities foundational to language production. Methods: 12 adults performed mouth opening and phoneme (/pa/) production tasks in separate blocks to a visual cue (ISI ~3.5sec). Jaw movements were tracked with an ultrasound-emitting devi...

We utilized the high temporal resolution, whole head coverage and novel analysis methodology of magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record the dynamics of cerebellar activation during focal motor seizures. We analyzed ictal MEG data from a four-year old using an event-related beamformer to localize and display ictal changes over the motor cortex and ce...

Auditory responses to speech sounds that are self-initiated are suppressed compared to responses to the same speech sounds during passive listening. This phenomenon is referred to as speech-induced suppression, a potentially important feedback-mediated speech-motor control process. In an earlier study, we found that both adults who do and do not st...

There is persistent debate as to whether or not EEG and MEG recordings in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) can detect mesial temporal interictal epileptiform discharges (spikes), and this issue is particularly relevant for source localization studies. With the aim of providing direct evidence pertinent to this debate we present de...

Previous functional neuroimaging studies have shown that maintenance of centrally presented objects in visual short-term memory (VSTM) leads to bilateral increases of BOLD activations in IPS/IOS cortex, while prior electrophysiological work suggests that maintaining stimuli encoded from a single hemifield leads to a sustained posterior contralatera...

We used magnetoencephalography to investigate the effect of directed attention on sensorimotor mu (8-12 Hz) response (mu reactivity) to non-painful electrical stimulation of the median nerve in healthy adults. Mu desynchronization in the 10-12 Hz bandwidth is typically observed during higher-order cognitive functions including selective attentional...

Amblyopia is a monocular loss of vision caused by abnormal early childhood visual experience. Despite prior efforts, the neural basis of amblyopia remains elusive: there is contradictory evidence on whether early visual cortex or higher cortical areas are affected. Some studies indicate normal activation in V1/V2 and diminished activity in higher c...

We combined MEG and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine evoked activity in visual areas during a task that involves both target selection and sustained attention. During task trials, 9 human subjects were presented with two white moving random dot patterns (RDPs, the target and the distractor), left and right of a central fixation spot on a...

Planning reaching or pointing movements requires a number of processing steps involving different brain areas. One important step consists of transforming visual information into motor plans that are appropriate for movement control. A key brain region involved in this process is the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Here we use magnetoencephalograp...

Maintenance of centrally presented objects in visual short-term memory (VSTM) leads to bilateral increases of the BOLD response in IPS/IOS cortex (Todd & Marois, 2004), while maintaining stimuli encoded from a single hemifield leads to a sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) in electrophysiology (Vogel & Machizawa, 2004). We recorded...

We measured visually-cued motor responses in two developmentally separate groups of children and compared these responses to a group of adults. We hypothesized that if post-movement beta rebound (PMBR) depends on developmentally sensitive processes, PMBR will be greatest in adults and progressively decrease in children performing a basic motor task...

Using the notion of complexity and synchrony, this study presents a data-driven pipeline of nonlinear analysis of neuromagnetic sources reconstructed from human magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data collected in reaction to vibrostimulation of the right index finger. The dynamics of MEG source activity was reconstructed with synthetic aperture magneto...

It has been previously demonstrated that magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a valuable tool to measure electromagnetic responses in the human brain during a variety of tasks. Here we combine MEG and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on healthy humans to study the brain electromagnetic responses during a task that involves selecting a target among diffe...

We used magnetoencephalography to investigate auditory evoked responses to speech vocalizations and non-speech tones in adults who do and do not stutter. Neuromagnetic field patterns were recorded as participants listened to a 1 kHz tone, playback of their own productions of the vowel /i/ and vowel-initial words, and actively generated the vowel /i...

The effects of averaging and filtering interictal epileptiform discharges (spikes) prior to MEG source modeling have been little studied. We analyzed MEG spikes recorded from six different temporal lobe cortical foci in a patient with medically intractable bilateral temporal lobe epilepsy investigated with combined scalp EEG/MEG and scalp-intracran...

Human adaptive behaviour to potential threats involves specialized brain responses allowing rapid and reflexive processing of the sensory input and a more directed processing for later evaluation of the nature of the threat. The amygdalae are known to play a key role in emotion processing. It is suggested that the amygdalae process threat-related i...