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 ...

Single units were recorded from the primary motor (MI) and supplementary motor (SMA) areas of Rhesus monkeys performing one-arm (unimanual) and two-arm (bimanual) proximal reaching tasks. During execution of the bimanual movements, the task related activity of about one-half the neurons in each area (MI: 129/232, SMA: 107/206) differed from the activity during similar displacements of one arm w...

Hemiparesis is the most common motor deficit following stroke. Bimanual training and robot-assisted therapy are often used to regain motor functionality of the paretic limb. The goal of this study is the development and validation of a bimanual training system that stimulates the use of both arms of hemiparetic subjects. The adaptive assistance control adjusts the contribution of the unaffected...

Do neural systems for planning motor actions play a functional role in understanding action language? Across multiple neuroimaging studies, processing action verbs correlates with somatotopic activity in premotor cortex (PMC). Yet, only one neurostimulation study supports a functional role for PMC in action verb understanding: paradoxically, inhibiting PMC made people respond faster to action v...

The control of unimanual and bimanual aiming movements by Parkinson's disease and control subjects was examined. Despite greater bimanual movement initiation asynchrony and overall bradykinesia, the Parkinson's disease subjects were affected by the experimental manipulations in the same way as controls. Symmetrical and, more especially, asymmetrical bimanual movements required more preparation ...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between bimanual (two handed) manipulation and the cognitive theories of task integration, divided attention and epistemic action. We explore these relationships by means of an empirical study based on a curve editing task. This task was designed on the principle of integrating the visual, conceptual and input device space domain of each hand's indi...

We analyzed the spontaneous prehensile activity of two infants living with their mothers in social groups, using videotapes taken once weekly from weeks 5 to 24. Prehensile activities were laterally symmetric. Unimanual activity predominated, although bimanual activity appeared at the same ages as unimanual activity. In most bimanual activity the two hands performed the same action, but complem...

The authors examined possible differences in left- and right-handers on bimanual reaction times to centralized visual stimuli. Eighty participants (n = 40 in each group of left- and right-handers) were tested on unimanual and bimanual reaction time (RT) tasks. Consistently across the 2 groups, the dominant-hand RT was faster, on average, than the nondominant-hand RT, and unimanual RTs were fast...