AIM To investigate the neuronal activation pattern underlying the effects of mirror illusion in children/adolescents with normal motor development and in children/adolescents with hemiparesis and preserved contralateral corticospinal organisation. METHOD The type of cortical reorganisation was classified according to results of transcranial magnetic stimulation. Only subjects with congenital ...

Bimanual coordination represents a complex self-organizing system that is subject to both internal and contextual constraints. Although there has been interest in examining bimanual development throughout the lifespan, few data exist relative to the bimanual activity of children between 1 and 4 years of age. The study reported here represents an initial effort to address this gap. Twenty-seven ...

Repetitive bimanual finger-tapping movements tend toward mirror symmetry: There is a spontaneous transition from less stable asymmetrical movement patterns to more stable symmetrical ones under frequency stress but not vice versa. During this phase transition, the interaction between the signals controlling each hand (cross talk) is expected to be prominent. To depict the regions of the brain i...

The present study examines the effects of a four-week training session in a pegboard task on uniand bimanual performance. Of particular interest was whether practice transfer from the trained to the untrained hand takes place. Twenty-five consistently right-handed subjects were trained to perform the task with the dominant hand, or the subdominant hand, or with both hands. After this training, ...

In discrete reaction time (RT) tasks, it has been shown that nonsymmetric bimanual movements are initiated slower than symmetric movements in response to symbolic cues. By contrast, no such RT differences are found in response to direct cues ("direct cue effect"). Here, we report three experiments showing that the direct cue effect generalizes to rhythmical bimanual movements and that RT cost d...

We have two arms, many muscles in each arm, and numerous neurons that contribute to their control. How does the brain assign responsibility to each of these potential actors? We considered a bimanual task in which people chose how much force to produce with each arm so that the sum would equal a target. We found that the dominant arm made a greater contribution, but only for specific directions...

Performing coordinated bimanual movement is a fundamental feature of the human motor system, with imaging techniques revealing the involvement of an extensive network of motor regions in both hemispheres. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, Liuzzi et al. (J Neurosci 31: 9111-9117, 2011) recently extended our understanding of the neural correlates of motor actions by showing that the nature...