It has been suggested that interconnected brain areas evolve in tandem because evolutionary pressures act on complete functional systems rather than on individual brain areas. The cerebellar cortex has reciprocal connections with both the prefrontal cortex and motor cortex, forming independent loops with each. Specifically, in capuchin monkeys cerebellar cortical lobules Crus I and Crus II conn...

To understand how different parts of the frontal cortex control the timing of action, we characterized the firing patterns of single neurons in two areas of rodent frontal cortex-dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and motor cortex-during a simple reaction time task. Principal component analysis was used to identify major patterns of delay-related activity in frontal cortex: ramping activity ...

The cortical representation of five simple hand and finger movements in the human motor cortex was determined in left- and right-handed people with whole-head magnetoencephalography. Different movements were found to be represented by spatially segregated dipolar sources in primary motor cortex. The spatial arrangement of neuronal sources for digit and wrist movements was nonsomatotopic and var...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Cortical reorganization of motor systems has been found in recovered stroke patients. Reorganization in nonrecovered hemiplegic stroke patients early after stroke, however, is less well described. We used positron emission tomography to study the functional reorganization of motor and sensory systems in hemiplegic stroke patients before motor recovery. METHODS Regional ...

A series of recent anatomical and functional data has radically changed our view on the organization of the motor cortex in primates. In the present article we present this view and discuss its fundamental principles. The basic principles are the following: (a) the motor cortex, defined as the agranular frontal cortex, is formed by a mosaic of separate areas, each of which contains an independe...

Nissen and Bullemer's (1987) serial reaction time task (SRT) has proven to be a useful model task for exploring implicit sequence learning. Neuropsychological research indicates that SRT learning may depend on the integrity of the basal ganglia, but not on medial temporal and diencephalic structures that are crucial for explicit learning. Recent neuroimaging research demonstrates that motor cor...

Systematic reviews of neuroimaging studies confirm stimulus-induced activity in response to verbal and non-verbal self-referential processing (SRP) cortical midline structures, temporoparietal cortex insula. Whether SRP can be causally modulated by way non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) has also been investigated several studies. Here we summarize the NIBS literature including 27 task-based ...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to activate the left motor cortex of four volunteers. The consequent hemodynamic changes in the right motor cortex were measured with optical imaging. Different stimulus intensities were applied, and a sham measurement was made in which the coil was tilted 90 degrees from its tangential orientation, so that it the induced electric field is not sufficie...

Epilepsy is associated with an abnormal expression of neural oscillations and their synchronization across brain regions. Oscillatory brain activation and synchronization also play an important role in cognition, perception and motor control. Childhood epilepsy is associated with a variety of cognitive and motor deficits, but the relationship between altered functional brain responses in variou...

Motor training results in encoding of motor memories, a form of use-dependent plasticity. Here we tested the hypothesis that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) synchronously applied to a motor cortex engaged in a motor training task could enhance this plastic process. Healthy volunteers were studied in four sessions: training consisting of performance of directionally specific voluntary th...