Background The initial years of life particularly the first two years are regarded as the most important brain development period. This study attempted to determine the effect of care package on motor development in 12-month-old infants in Saqqez-Iran. Materials and Methods:This study was a clinical trial conducted in 2016 on 70 infants of 12 months of age selected randomly in intervention and...

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a genetic disorder which affect nervous system and is characterized with progressive distal motor neuron weakness. The survival motor neuron (SMN) protein level reduces in patients with SMA. Two different genes code survival motor neuron protein in human genome. Skeletal and intercostal muscles denervation lead to weakness, hypotony, hyporeflexia, respiratory fa...

In brain-computer interfacing (BCI), motor imagery is used to provide a gateway to an effector action or behavior. However, in contrast to the main functional role of the primary motor cortex (M1) in motor execution, the M1's involvement in motor imagery has been debated, while the roles of secondary motor areas such as the premotor cortex (PMC) and supplementary motor area (SMA) in motor image...

When teaching a complex sequence, the sequence is often chunked into components; however, this strategy may not always benefit learning, but may be detrimental. The hypothesis is that this occurs because chunking deprives learners of compound cues that could aid recall. To test this, participants learned 9-item movement sequences, either as three 3-item chunks or as one 9-item series. To underm...

The authors examined how the effectiveness of feedback for the learning of complex motor skills is affected by the focus of attention it induces. The feedback referred specifically either to body movements (internal focus) or to movement effects (external focus). In Experiment 1, groups of novices and advanced volleyball players (N = 48) practiced "tennis" serves under internal-focus or externa...

Rhythmic and discrete arm movements occur ubiquitously in everyday life, and there is a debate as to whether these two classes of movements arise from the same or different underlying neural mechanisms. Here we examine interference in a motor-learning paradigm to test whether rhythmic and discrete movements employ at least partially separate neural representations. Subjects were required to mak...

The formation and function of axons depends on the microtubule-based transport of cellular components from their sites of synthesis in the neuronal cell body to their sites of utilization at the axon terminus. To directly visualize this axonal transport in a living organism, we constructed transgenic lines of Caenorhabditis elegans that express green fluorescent protein fused to the monomeric s...

Introduction: Motor skills play an important role during life span, and older adults need to learn or relearn these skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate how aging affects induction of improved movement performance by motor training. Methods: Serial Reaction Time Test (SRTT) was used to assess movement performance during 8 blocks of motor training. Participants were tested i...

Theories of motor learning predict that training a movement reduces the amount of attention needed for its performance (i.e., more automatic). If training one movement transfers, then the amount of attention needed for performing a second movement should also be reduced, as measured under dual task conditions. The authors' purpose was to test whether dual task paradigms are feasible for detecti...