BACKGROUND Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique that can be used to assess corticospinal plasticity. Current TMS practices involve the administration of multiple stimuli over target areas of the participant's scalp. However, these procedures require 1 to 2 h per assessment. Decreasing the number of stimuli delivered during TMS assessments would improve time efficiency and decr...

OBJECTIVE We investigated how multi-joint changes in static upper limb posture impact the corticomotor excitability of the posterior deltoid (PD) and biceps brachii (BIC), and evaluated whether postural variations in excitability related directly to changes in target muscle length. METHODS The amplitude of individual motor evoked potentials (MEPs) was evaluated in each of thirteen different s...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have demonstrated that unilateral muscle contractions in the upper limb produce motor cortical activity in both the contralateral and ipsilateral motor cortices. The increase in excitability of the corticomotor pathway activating the resting limb has been termed "cross-activation", and is of importance due to its involvement in cross-education and...

Motor performance induces a postexercise increase in corticomotor excitability that may be associated with motor learning. We investigated whether there are hemispheric differences in the extent and/or time course of changes in corticomotor excitability following a manipulation task (Purdue pegboard) and their relationship with motor performance. Single- and paired-pulse (3 ms) transcranial mag...

The aim of this preliminary study was to investigate motor cortex (cortical) excitability between a similar fine visuomotor task of varying difficulty. Ten healthy adults (three female, seven male; 20-45 years of age) participated in the study. Participants were instructed to perform a fine visuomotor task by statically abducting their first index finger against a force transducer which display...

Movement observation (MO) has been shown to activate the motor cortex of the observer as indicated by an increase of corticomotor excitability for muscles involved in the observed actions. Moreover, behavioral work has strongly suggested that this process occurs in a near-automatic manner. Here we further tested this proposal by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) when subjects obs...