Neural dynamics of learning sound-action associations.
A motor component is pre-requisite to any communicative act as one must inherently move to communicate. To learn to make a communicative act, the brain must be able to dynamically associate arbitrary percepts to the neural substrate underlying the pre-requisite motor activity. We aimed to investigate whether brain regions involved in complex gestures (ventral pre-motor cortex, Brodmann Area 44) were involved in mediating association between novel abstract auditory stimuli and novel gestural movements. In a functional resonance imaging (fMRI) study we asked participants to learn associations between previously unrelated novel sounds and meaningless gestures inside the scanner. We use functio…
A fronto-parietal network is mediating improvement of motor function related to repetitive peripheral magnetic stimulation: A PET-H2O15 study.
Repetitive peripheral magnetic stimulation (RPMS) is a focused and painless stimulation method, in which muscle contractions are elicited by depolarization of the terminal motor branches. Clinical-experimental investigations on different disorders of sensorimotor integration in the last decade have shown that RPMS can be used for the rehabilitation of motor functions after stroke. It is supposed that this therapeutic effect is based on the RPMS-induced proprioceptive inflow to the CNS. To analyze the conditioning effects of RPMS on reorganization of the motor system on cortical level positron emission tomography (PET) is used. Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) has been measured using H(2)…