Author Description

This dissertation, "Modulations of Cortical Oscillatory Activities by Nociceptive Pain" by Weiwei, Peng,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Nociception is the encoding and processing of noxious stimuli that is important as a protective mechanism to avoid potential or actual tissue damage. Previously, the neural basis of nociceptive processing was investigated by various neuroimaging techniques that measured neural activities in response to the experimental noxious stimuli. Such noxious stimuli can elicit sudden and short-lasting changes (event related potentials [ERPs], time-locked and phase-locked to the stimuli), and can trigger transient modulations of the ongoing oscillatory brain activity (appearing as event related desynchronization [ERD]/event related synchronization [ERS], time-locked but non-phase-locked to the stimuli). Most investigated pain-related ERPs have been shown to be correlated with subjective pain perception, reflecting the involuntary mechanism of attentional reorientation to a novel stimulus. In addition, pain induced α-ERD/ERS has been repeatedly associated with the administration of noxious stimuli, but their neural functions are still not fully understood. For a better understanding of the neural mechanism of α-ERD in pain perception, we comprehensively investigated changes in alpha oscillatory activities induced by transient and tonic experimental noxious stimuli. First, by applying oddball paradigms composed of auditory, visual, somatosensory, and pain modalities, we evaluated the characteristics of α-ERD and assessed the effective connectivity between P300 an