Long-term motor skill training with individually adjusted progressive difficulty enhances learning and promotes corticospinal plasticity.

Motor skill acquisition depends on central nervous plasticity. However, behavioural determinants leading to long lasting corticospinal plasticity and motor expertise remain unexplored. Here we investigate behavioural and electrophysiological effects of individually tailored progressive practice during long-term motor skill training.

Long-term progressive motor skill training enhances corticospinal excitability for the ipsilateral hemisphere and motor performance of the untrained hand.

It is well established that unilateral motor practice can lead to increased performance in the opposite non-trained hand. Here, we test the hypothesis that progressively increasing task difficulty during long-term skill training with the dominant right hand increase performance and corticomotor excitability of the left non-trained hand. Subjects practiced a visuomotor tracking task engaging right digit V for 6 weeks with either progressively increasing task difficulty (PT) or no progression (NPT).

Modulation of proprioceptive feedback during functional electrical stimulation: an fMRI study.

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is sometimes used as a therapeutic modality in motor rehabilitation to augment voluntary motor drive to effect movement that would otherwise not be possible through voluntary activation alone. Effective motor rehabilitation should require that the central nervous system integrate efferent commands and appropriate afferent information to update the internal models of acquired skills. Here, we investigate whether FES-evoked (FES-ev) and FES-assisted (FES-as) movement are associated with the normal integration of motor commands and sensory feedback in a group of healthy participants during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Interaction of electrical stimulation and voluntary hand movement in SII and the cerebellum during simulated therapeutic functional electrical stimulation in healthy adults.

The therapeutic application of functional electrical stimulation (FES) has shown promising clinical results in the rehabilitation of post-stroke hemiplegia. It appears that the effect is optimal when the patterned electrical stimulation is used in close synchrony with voluntary movement, although the neural mechanisms that underlie the clinical successes reported with therapeutic FES are unknown. One possibility is that therapeutic FES takes advantage of the sensory consequences of an internal model.

Illusory sensation of movement induced by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Human movement sense relies on both somatosensory feedback and on knowledge of the motor commands used to produce the movement. We have induced a movement illusion using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over primary motor cortex and dorsal premotor cortex in the absence of limb movement and its associated somatosensory feedback. Afferent and efferent neural signalling was abolished in the arm with ischemic nerve block, and in the leg with spinal nerve block.