Comparisons on Perception Mechanism of Mental Rotation Between Health and Stroke Groups with EEG Indicators

Clinically, motor rehabilitation and mechanism research have garnered increasing attention. However, cognitive impairments often accompany stroke patients. Mental rotation is a crucial task for cognitive evaluation and training. In our study, we proposed a method to compare mental rotation perception mechanisms between healthy individuals and stroke patients using EEG indicators. The experiment was designed to accommodate stroke patients. In the data analysis module, we utilized power spectral density (PSD) to explore single-channel frequency domain indicators and phase-locked value (PLV) to analyze connectivity between channels. Mechanism analysis based on EEG indicators considered three main conditions: counter-clockwise and clockwise rotation, lesion area versus functional area across strokes, and mental rotation perception sub-stages. Our experimental results show significant differences between the stroke group and health group in the θ and α frequency bands across counter-clock and clock-wise perception and lesion connectivity conditions. The stroke group reveals a compensatory effect in the lesion areas, with higher PLV values (averaging 0.2101) compared to those in common cognitive functional areas of the health group and the connectivity within lesion areas was significantly lower (averaging 0.0310) than that outside the lesion areas. These findings could assist in stroke treatment and monitoring rehabilitation progress.