Although evidence of implicit motor learning on the basis of observation alone has been reported, there is some data to suggest that the phenomenon could be contaminated by the intentional exploitation of explicit knowledge. In the present experiment, a special procedure was adapted to study observational learning in a situation involving the acquisition of a new drawing behavior. The participa...

Recent anatomic and functional data radically changed our ideas about the organization of the motor cortex in primates. Contrary to the classic view, the motor cortex does not consist of two main areas, primary and supplementary motor areas, but of a mosaic of cortical areas with specific connections and functional properties.

The ability to perform accurate sequential movements is essential to normal motor function. Learning a sequential motor behavior is comprised of two basic components: explicit identification of the order in which the sequence elements should be performed and implicit acquisition of spatial accuracy for each element. Here we investigated the time course of learning of these components for a firs...

The primary motor cortex is a critical node in the network of brain regions responsible for voluntary motor behavior. It has been less appreciated, however, that the motor cortex exhibits sensory responses in a variety of modalities including vision and somatosensation. We review current work that emphasizes the heterogeneity in sensorimotor responses in the motor cortex and focus on its implic...

BACKGROUND The association between motor imagery ability and brain neural activity that leads to the manifestation of a motor illusion remains unclear. OBJECTIVE In this study, we examined the association between the ability to generate motor imagery and brain neural activity leading to the induction of a motor illusion by vibratory stimulation. METHODS The sample consisted of 20 healthy in...

Synopsis To investigate if motor cortical representation shows plastic change after short-term somatosensory stimulation, the brain activation during the right thumb movement was compared before and after transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation (TENS) by using fMRI. The activation in the primary motor area (M1) decreased after the intervention with TENS. This reduction lasted for 30 min. The ...

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 213 A GENERAL LAW OF MOTOR LEARNING ................................................. 215 Motor Learning as a Power Law .............................................................. 216 The Power Law--A Special Case of Motor Learning? .................................... 217 WHAT IS LEARNED WITH ...

In motor learning, our brain uses movement errors to adjust planning of future movements. This process has traditionally been studied by examining how motor planning is adjusted in response to visuomotor or dynamic perturbations. Here, I show that the learning strategy can be better identified from the statistics of movements made in the absence of perturbations. The strategy identified this wa...