Differences between Mental and Physical Preparation of Muscular Contraction: A Pilot Study

This paper studies some differences between mental and phys ical preparation of muscular contraction from a signal processing point of view. Mental preparation is a cog nitive process prior to performance while physical preparation is a bodily movement produced by skeletal muscl es. Two features are selected. The first indicator, called Mean Normalized Preparation Power (MNPP), represen ts the amount of muscular activity produced during preparation. The second feature, called Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), studies the functional connectivity between a pair of agonist/antagonist muscles entering in action. Results showed that connectivity is more important in Mental Preparation Activity (MPA) than in Physical Preparation Activity (PPA) while muscles power is more important in PPA than in MPA. When class ifying the preparation according to muscular activity importance (low and large preparation), previous conclusions are valid for large preparation. In case of small preparation, there is no differences between MPA an d PPA in term of MNPP while MPA has higher NMI. Finally, the study of the correlation between MNPP and N MI showed a moderate dependence with the agonist muscle and an independence with the antagonist musc le.