Scalp EEG detects motor sequence replay signatures during wakeful rest
- 1Tarleton State University
Abstract
Brief wakeful rest may support motor-memory processing through replay of recently practiced neural sequences, but human motor replay has been demonstrated mainly with invasive recordings or magnetoencephalography. Here we tested whether ordered motor-sequence replay can be detected from scalp EEG across wakeful rest during motor skill learning. During rest, participants received no cue, regular or accelerated auditory targeted-memory reactivation (TMR), or randomized tones. Neural states re-emerged in the practiced sequence order, revealing forward replay across conditions. Accelerated TMR enhanced total learning; within this condition, stronger forward replay showed the clearest exploratory relationship with micro-offline gains, while forward and reverse replay also covaried with gains across the cohort. The apparent replay timescale shifted systematically with decoder temporal resolution, showing that measured timing reflects both neural dynamics and the observation model. These findings support scalp EEG as a scalable approach for studying ordered motor-sequence reactivation during wakeful rest.
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BibTeX
@misc{dash2026scalp,
title = {{Scalp EEG detects motor sequence replay signatures during wakeful rest}},
author = {D. Dash and H. Sugata},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.22.760953},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.22.760953v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Scalp EEG detects motor sequence replay signatures during wakeful rest
AU - D. Dash
AU - H. Sugata
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.22.760953
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.22.760953v1
AB - Brief wakeful rest may support motor-memory processing through replay of recently practiced neural sequences, but human motor replay has been demonstrated mainly with invasive recordings or magnetoencephalography. Here we tested whether ordered motor-sequence replay can be detected from scalp EEG across wakeful rest during motor skill learning. During rest, participants received no cue, regular or accelerated auditory targeted-memory reactivation (TMR), or randomized tones. Neural states re-emerged in the practiced sequence order, revealing forward replay across conditions. Accelerated TMR enhanced total learning; within this condition, stronger forward replay showed the clearest exploratory relationship with micro-offline gains, while forward and reverse replay also covaried with gains across the cohort. The apparent replay timescale shifted systematically with decoder temporal resolution, showing that measured timing reflects both neural dynamics and the observation model. These findings support scalp EEG as a scalable approach for studying ordered motor-sequence reactivation during wakeful rest.
ER -