Examining Lateralized Aspects of Motor Control Using Non-invasive Neural Stimulation

Voluntary movement and sensory perception are fundamental aspects of the humanexperience. Senses such as visual and proprioceptive feedback inform movement bycontinuously providing the central nervous system with information on limb location,movement error, and task performance. However, the specific mechanisms behind howdifferent forms of sensory information are used to adapt and generalize movement remainpoorly understood.Motor adaptation, or the modification of movement based on error feedback (Martin et al.,1996), is often elicited during rehabilitation but must be generalized to functionalperformance, such as activities of daily living, in order to successfully rehabilitatemotor deficits following stroke. Motor adaptation and generalization are believed tooccur via the integration of various forms of sensory feedback for a congruentrepresentation of the body's position in space along with estimation of inertialproperties of the limb segments for accurate specification of movement. Thus, motoradaptation is often studied within curated environments incorporating a "mis‐match"between different sensory systems (i.e. a visual field shift via prism googles or avisuomotor rotation via virtual reality environment) and observing how motor plans changebased on this mis‐match. However, these adaptations are environment‐specific and showlittle generalization outside of their restricted experimental setup. There remains aneed for motor adaptation research that demonstrates motor learning that generalizes toother environments and movement types. This work could then inform physical andoccupational therapy neurorehabilitation interventions targeted at addressing motordeficits.