When manipulating objects with both hands, the corpus callosum (CC) is of paramount importance for interhemispheric information exchange. Hence, CC damage results in impaired bimanual performance. Here, healthy young adults performed a complex bimanual dial rotation task with or without augmented visual feedback and according to five interhand frequency ratios (1:1, 1:3, 2:3, 3:1, 3:2). The rel...

As bimanual robots become increasingly popular, learning and control algorithms must take into account new constraints and challenges imposed by this morphology. Most research on learning bimanual skills has focused on learning coordination between end-effectors, exploiting operational space formulations. However, motion patterns in bimanual scenarios are not exclusive to operational space, als...

Bimanual actions involve coordinated motion but often rely on the movements performed with each hand to be different. Older adults exhibit differentially greater variability for bimanual actions in which each hand has an independent movement goal. Such actions rely on interhemispheric communication via the corpus callosum, including both facilitatory and inhibitory interactions. Here, we invest...

The study of bimanual coordination is an area of intense recent research. This contrasts with a relative lack of interest in bimanual coordination – particularly in the area of cortical physiology – over the preceding years. This increased recent interest has been fueled in part by new theoretical approaches and recording techniques that place an emphasis on the role of neuronal interactions in...

Converging evidence suggest that motor training is associated with early and late changes of the cortical motor system. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) offers the possibility to study plastic rearrangements of the motor system in physiological and pathological conditions. We used TMS to characterize long-term changes in upper limb motor cortical representation and interhemispheric inhib...

As robots are becoming more and more complex, with higher degrees-of-freedom, lighter limbs, and springy joints, it becomes harder to control their movements. New approaches, inspired from neuroscience, are attracting increased attention among computer scientists dealing with motor control. The focus in this thesis is on how robots can learn to control their limbs by learning how their bodies w...

OBJECTIVES Left ventricular septal myectomy is the therapeutic 'gold standard' for patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy whose symptoms are refractory to medical therapy. We describe our initial clinical experience with a new surgical technique for septal myectomy utilizing the 'bimanual examination' in order to more reliably complete extended septal myectomy during cardioplegic...

Our recent work has shown that older adults are disproportionately impaired at bimanual tasks when the two hands are moving out of phase with each other [Bangert, A. S., Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., Walsh, C. M., Schachter, A. B., & Seidler, R. D. Bimanual coordination and aging: Neurobehavioral implications. Neuropsychologia, 48, 1165-1170, 2010]. Interhemispheric interactions play a key role during ...