This study investigated the effect of anodal tDCS on motor control and corticomotor excitability in healthy controls, with the long-term goal of investigating the use of anodal tDCS to improve motor function in covertly aware vegetative state patients. Experiment I investigated the effects of anodal tDCS on a motor reaction time task, and found no effect of tDCS on performance, whether or not p...

Objective. High intensity interval treadmill training (HIITT) has been gaining popularity for gait rehabilitation after stroke. In this study, we examined the changes in excitability of the lower limb motor cortical representation (M1) in chronic stroke survivors following a single session of HIITT. We also determined whether exercise-induced changes in excitability could be modulated by transc...

We review a series of studies exemplifying some applications of single-pulse and paired-transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in the study of spatial attention and of its deficits. We will focus primarily on sensory extinction, the failure to consciously perceive a contralesional sensory stimulus only during bilateral stimulation of homologous surfaces. TMS studies in healthy controls show th...

Motor practice elicits use-dependent plasticity in humans as well as in animals. Given the influence of cholinergic neurotransmission on learning and memory processes, we evaluated the effects of scopolamine (a muscarinic receptor antagonist) on use-dependent plasticity and corticomotor excitability in a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized design study. Use-dependent plasticity was subst...

INTRODUCTION Many patients with stroke have moderate to severe long-term sensorimotor impairments, often including inability to execute movements of the affected arm or hand. Limited recovery from stroke may be partly caused by imbalanced interaction between the cerebral hemispheres, with reduced excitability of the ipsilesional motor cortex while excitability of the contralesional motor cortex...

Spatial neglect is traditionally explained as an imbalance of the interhemispheric reciprocal inhibition exerted by the two hemispheres: after a right lesion, the contralesional hemisphere becomes disinhibited and its enhanced activity suppresses the activity in the lesioned one. Even though the hyperexcitability of the left hemisphere is the theoretical framework of several rehabilitation inte...

RATIONALE Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is used alone or in combination with physiotherapy for rehabilitation of stroke patients. TMS mapping can also quantify the excitability of the motor area in both the ipsilesional (IL) and contralateral (CL) hemisphere. OBJECTIVE This study is the first to measure the dynamics of cortical excitability by TMS mapping before and afte...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Although there is some early evidence showing the value of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in stroke rehabilitation, the therapeutic effect of high-frequency rTMS, along with the physiology of rTMS-induced corticomotor excitability supporting motor learning in stroke, has not been established. This study investigated high-frequency rTMS-induced cortica...