Brain sources of the theta EEG rhythm underlying inhibitory control and replanning in active navigation in the Virtual House Locomotor Maze
Location: Room 101 - 11/2/23, 11:30 AM - 11/2/23, 12:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) (30 minutes)

Brain sources of the theta EEG rhythm underlying inhibitory control and replanning in active navigation in the Virtual House Locomotor Maze
Prof. Dr. Guy Cheron

He is a neurophysiologist and as a Full Professor at the ULB, he runs the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Movement Biomechanics (LNMB) from 1993 to 2020. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 papers in international journals, 20 chapters, and two books. Its Research Gate Score is 42.77, its h index is 47 and its citation impact is 8.136. He was initially trained in neuroscience under the supervision of Professor J.E. Desmedt at the Brain Unit Research of the ULB where he described new components of the somatosensory evoked potentials. In 1986, he discovered, together with E. Godaux, the localization of the oculomotor neural integrator (NI) in the nucleus prepositus of the cat, demonstrating for the first time the biological recognition that a brainstem neural network can perform mathematical integration crucial for the control of eye movements. From 1986 to 1997, they revealed the physiological mechanisms of the NI, which are now confirmed in different species. Cheron and collaborators were also the first to demonstrate the emergence of 160-200 Hz oscillation in the cerebellum of different mouse models presenting ataxia. In the field of brain computing interface, he was one of the PIs involved in the Mindwalker project resulting in the first European walking exoskeleton piloted by brain signals. In the field of neurocognitive science, G. Cheron was co-PI of Neurocog and Neurospat ESA missions performed in the International Space Station during which the LNMB team developed new sensorimotor paradigms (virtual reality) coupled with EEG dynamics. These neurotechnologies were successfully applied in the field of ADHD (NeuroATT Biowin project). In the field of human brain oscillations, this group recently demonstrated with Riemannian classification the possibility of recognizing the violent and festive mental state in a social context. G. Cheron and the LNMB teams are also involved in sports neuroscience research in which the relationships between movement and EEG dynamics are highlighted.


We investigate inhibitory control and mental flexibility during active navigation in the “Virtual House Locomotor Maze” (VHLM) (Castilla et al., 2021). Concretely, the VHLM asses replanning by first asking the participant to repeat five times a self-chosen path to reach a given house in the maze. After having learned it, the path is blocked on the 6th navigation, imposing the subject to inhibit the learned trajectory and to design a new one. Our previous preliminary analysis showed theta power spectrum increases during active navigation in both the five first navigations and the blocked path navigations. For this, 64 EEG signals were recorded on 19 healthy participants (age range 18 – 29 years) with eegoTM sports (EEG system LE-200, ANT Neuro, The Netherlands) while performing the VHLM protocol. Offline, data treatment, and statistics were performed by means of EEGLAB software (Delorme and Makeig, 2004). Initially, a 200 Hz low pass and a 0.1 Hz high pass filters were applied. Then any artefactual portion of the EEG data was rejected by visual inspection. Synchronous or partially synchronous artefactual activity (mostly blinks) was detected and rejected by independent component analysis (ICA). The baseline normalized spectrograms or event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP in dB) for each EEG signal and subject were calculated with respect to the house target’s event. Source locations of the theta oscillations are estimated with swLORETA modeling (ASA software, ANT Neuro, The Netherlands). In the present study, we investigate the theta power spectrum evolution through the six navigations to differentiate the planning, learning, acquisition, inhibition, and replanning processes.