HMNS Seminar Dissociating the roles of motor areas in beat-based timing using brain stimulation

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 20 November 2015

Time:

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Room:

127

UQ Location:

Human Performance Laboratories (St Lucia)

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Timing is crucial for effective motor control. Time intervals can be represented relative to a recurrent beat (beat-based timing), or as absolute durations (non-beat-based timing). Neuroimaging and neuropsychological work suggests involvement of the supplementary motor area (SMA) in beat-based timing, and the premotor cortices and the cerebellum in non-beat-based timing, however, causal evidence is lacking.
This talk will describe experiments examining how performance on beat-based and non-beat-based timing is enhanced or impaired by altering excitability of the supplementary motor area (SMA), the right cerebellum, or the bilateral dorsal premotor cortices. Crucially, it was found that increasing SMA excitability improved discrimination of beat rhythms, whereas decreasing SMA excitability impaired discrimination of beat rhythms. This polarity-dependent effect was absent for the premotor cortex and the cerebellum. These findings provide causal evidence that basal ganglia-SMA networks play a greater role in beat-based rhythm discrimination than premotor or cerebellar networks.

Presenter:
Dr Li-Ann Leow is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Sensorimotor Performance, at the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences (UQ).