Time of day and sleep effects on motor acquisition and consolidation.

We investigated the influence of the time-of-day and sleep on skill acquisition (i.e., skill improvement immediately after a training-session) and consolidation (i.

Motor Imagery Training Is Beneficial for Motor Memory of Upper and Lower Limb Tasks in Very Old Adults.

Human aging is associated with a decline in the capacity to memorize recently acquired motor skills. Motor imagery training is a beneficial method to compensate for this deterioration in old adults. It is not yet known whether these beneficial effects are maintained in very old adults (>80 years), who are more affected by the degeneration processes.

Time-of-day effects on skill acquisition and consolidation after physical and mental practices.

Time-of-day influences both physical and mental performances. Its impact on motor learning is, however, not well established yet. Here, using a finger tapping-task, we investigated the time-of-day effect on skill acquisition (i.

Smoothness Discriminates Physical from Motor Imagery Practice of Arm Reaching Movements.

Physical practice (PP) and motor imagery practice (MP) lead to the execution of fast and accurate arm movements. However, there is currently no information about the influence of MP on movement smoothness, nor about which performance parameters best discriminate these practices. In the current study, we assessed motor performances with an arm pointing task with constrained precision before and after PP (n = 15), MP (n = 15), or no practice (n = 15).

Beta Rebound as an Index of Temporal Integration of Somatosensory and Motor Signals.

Modulation of cortical beta rhythm (15-30 Hz) is present during preparation for and execution of voluntary movements as well as during somatosensory stimulation. A rebound in beta synchronization is observed after the end of voluntary movements as well as after somatosensory stimulation and is believed to describe the return to baseline of sensorimotor networks. However, the contribution of efferent and afferent signals to the beta rebound remains poorly understood.

Author Correction: Multi-layer adaptation of group coordination in musical ensembles.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Motor cortical inhibition during concurrent action execution and action observation.

Action Execution (AE) and Action Observation (AO) share an extended cortical network of activated areas. During coordinative action these processes also overlap in time, potentially giving rise to behavioral interference effects. The neurophysiological mechanisms subtending the interaction between concurrent AE and AO are substantially unknown.

Multi-layer adaptation of group coordination in musical ensembles.

Group coordination passes through an efficient integration of multimodal sources of information. This study examines complex non-verbal communication by recording movement kinematics from conductors and two sections of violinists of an orchestra adapting to a perturbation affecting their normal pattern of sensorimotor communication (rotation of half a turn of the first violinists' section). We show that different coordination signals are channeled through ancillary (head kinematics) and instrumental movements (bow kinematics).

The neural oscillatory markers of phonetic convergence during verbal interaction.

During a conversation, the neural processes supporting speech production and perception overlap in time and, based on context, expectations and the dynamics of interaction, they are also continuously modulated in real time. Recently, the growing interest in the neural dynamics underlying interactive tasks, in particular in the language domain, has mainly tackled the temporal aspects of turn-taking in dialogs. Besides temporal coordination, an under-investigated phenomenon is the implicit convergence of the speakers toward a shared phonetic space.

Deciphering the functional role of spatial and temporal muscle synergies in whole-body movements.

Voluntary movement is hypothesized to rely on a limited number of muscle synergies, the recruitment of which translates task goals into effective muscle activity. In this study, we investigated how to analytically characterize the functional role of different types of muscle synergies in task performance. To this end, we recorded a comprehensive dataset of muscle activity during a variety of whole-body pointing movements.

Shifts in Key Time Points and Strategies for a Multisegment Motor Task in Healthy Aging Subjects.

In this study, we compared key temporal points in the whole body pointing movement of healthy aging and young subjects. During this movement, subject leans forward from a standing position to reach a target. As it involves forward inclination of the trunk, the movement creates a risk for falling.

Space-by-Time Modular Decomposition Effectively Describes Whole-Body Muscle Activity During Upright Reaching in Various Directions.

The modular control hypothesis suggests that motor commands are built from precoded modules whose specific combined recruitment can allow the performance of virtually any motor task. Despite considerable experimental support, this hypothesis remains tentative as classical findings of reduced dimensionality in muscle activity may also result from other constraints (biomechanical couplings, data averaging or low dimensionality of motor tasks). Here we assessed the effectiveness of modularity in describing muscle activity in a comprehensive experiment comprising 72 distinct point-to-point whole-body movements during which the activity of 30 muscles was recorded.

Attentional bias on motor control: is motor inhibition influenced by attentional reorienting?

Motor inhibition and attentional processing are tightly linked. Recent neurophysiological studies have shown that both processes might rely on similar cognitive and neural mechanisms (Wessel and Aron, Neuron 93:259-280, 2017). However, it remains unclear whether attentional reorientation influences inhibition of a subsequent action.

Action observation effects reflect the modular organization of the human motor system.

Action observation, similarly to action execution, facilitates the observer's motor system and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) has been instrumental in exploring the nature of these motor activities. However, contradictory findings question some of the fundamental assumptions regarding the neural computations run by the Action Observation Network (AON). To better understand this issue, we delivered TMS over the observers' motor cortex at two timings of two reaching-grasping actions (precision vs power grip) and we recorded Motor-Evoked Potentials (4 hand/arm muscles; MEPs).

Differences in gaze anticipation for locomotion with and without vision.

Previous experimental studies have shown a spontaneous anticipation of locomotor trajectory by the head and gaze direction during human locomotion. This anticipatory behavior could serve several functions: an optimal selection of visual information, for instance through landmarks and optic flow, as well as trajectory planning and motor control. This would imply that anticipation remains in darkness but with different characteristics.