Séminaire interne : Marta BORTOLETTO

Speaker: Marta Bortoletto, MoMiLab, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy

The coregistration of transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) provides crucial information on brain activity modulation when TMS is employed to investigate causal relationships between brain activity and behaviour. By directly perturbing cortical regions and recording the resulting electrophysiological responses, TMS-EEG enables the characterization of the propagation of activity generated by the TMS across brain networks. Importantly, recent findings also revealed immediate TMS-related responses and high-frequency power components that reflect the local cortical excitability of the target area. These data are of great advantage for studying the causal role of brain dynamics in cognition. However, the interpretation of TMS-EEG signals is strongly influenced by methodological factors, including stimulation parameters, recording settings, and preprocessing pipelines. Thus, a crucial issue concerns the broader implications of this variability. Specifically, it is important to determine to what extent and in what ways methodological choices influence the scientific conclusions drawn from TMS–EEG data.