This study investigates if anodal and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of areas above the motor cortex (C3) influences spontaneous motor imagery experienced in the waking resting state. A randomized triple-blinded design was used, combining neurophysiological techniques with tools of quantitative mentation report analysis from cognitive linguistics. The results indicate t...

BACKGROUND Motor imagery is considered as a promising therapeutic tool for rehabilitation of motor planning problems in patients with cerebral palsy. However motor planning problems may lead to poor motor imagery ability. AIM The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to examine and compare brain activation following motor imagery tasks in patients with hemiplegic cerebra...

Aims. While studies on healthy subjects have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits, few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery in stroke patients with hemiparesis. This work is aimed at examining similarities between motor imagery and execution in a group of stroke patients. Materials and Methods. Eleven patients were asked to perfo...

PURPOSE Motor imagery can improve motor function and reduce pain. This is relevant to individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) in whom motor dysfunction and neuropathic pain are prevalent. However, therapy efficacy could be dependent on motor imagery ability, and a clear understanding of how motor imagery might be facilitated is currently lacking. Thus, the aim of the present study was to asse...

Skilled performers such as athletes or musicians can improve their performance by imagining the actions or sensory outcomes associated with their skill. Performers vary widely in their auditory and motor imagery abilities, and these individual differences influence sensorimotor learning. It is unknown whether imagery abilities influence both memory encoding and retrieval. We examined how audito...

There is little consensus on how motor imagery ability should be measured in stroke patients. In particular it is unclear how two methods tapping different aspects of the motor imagery process relate to each other. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between implicit and explicit motor imagery ability by comparing performance of stroke patients and controls on a motor imag...

Motor imagery is a widely used paradigm for the study of cognitive aspects of action control, both in the healthy and the pathological brain. In this paper we review how motor imagery research has advanced our knowledge of behavioral and neural aspects of action control, both in healthy subjects and clinical populations. Furthermore, we will illustrate how motor imagery can provide new insights...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was employed to probe the modulatory effects of transcranial direct current stimulation of motor cortex on motor evoked responses (MEPs) produced during motor imagery. MEP amplitudes at rest and during motor imagery were assessed before and for a period of 60 min after transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied over the primary motor cortex at...

There is increasing interest in electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) as a tool for rehabilitation of upper limb motor functions in hemiplegic stroke patients. This type of BCI often exploits mu and beta oscillations in EEG recorded over the sensorimotor areas, and their event-related desynchronization (ERD) following motor imagery is believed to represent increased se...