Human motor behaviour is continually modified on the basis of errors between desired and actual movement outcomes. It is emerging that the role played by the primary motor cortex (M1) in this process is contingent upon a variety of factors, including the nature of the task being performed, and the stage of learning. Here we used repetitive TMS to…

We tested the hypothesis that a computational overload results when two activities, one motor and the other cognitive that draw on the same neural processing pathways, are performed concurrently. Healthy young adult subjects carried out two seemingly distinct tasks of maintaining standing balance control under conditions of low (eyes closed),…

Ocular motor abnormalities are a common feature of multiple sclerosis (MS), with more salient deficits reflecting tissue damage within brainstem and cerebellar circuits. However, MS may also result in disruption to higher level or cognitive control processes governing eye movement, including attentional processes that enhance the neural processing…

Does the mirror system affect the control of speech? This issue was addressed in behavioral and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) experiments. In behavioral experiment 1, participants pronounced the syllable /da/ while observing (1) a hand grasping large and small objects with power and precision grasps, respectively, (2) a foot interacting…

Optic ataxia (OA) is generally thought of as a disorder of visually guided reaching movements that cannot be explained by any simple deficit in visual or motor processing. In this paper we offer a new perspective on optic ataxia; we argue that the popular characterisation of this disorder is misleading and is unrepresentative of the pattern of…