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The role of the motor cortex in perceptual and cognitive functions is highly controversial. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that the motor cortex can be instrumental for translating foreign language vocabulary. Participants were trained on foreign language (L2) words and their native language translations over four consecutive days. L2 words were accompanied by complementary gestures (sensorimotor enrichment) or pictures (sensory enrichment). Following training, participants translated the auditorily-presented L2 words that they had learned and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was applied to the bilateral posterior motor cortices. Compared to sham stimulation, effective perturbation by rTMS slowed down the translation of sensorimotor-enriched L2 words - but not sensory-enriched L2 words. This finding suggests that sensorimotor-enriched training induced changes in L2 representations within the motor cortex, which in turn facilitated the translation of L2 words. The motor cortex may play a causal role in precipitating sensorimotor-based learning benefits, and may directly aid in remembering the native language translations of foreign language words following sensorimotor-enriched training. These findings support multisensory theories of learning while challenging reactivation-based theories.
How dynamic interactions between nervous system regions in mammals performs online motor control remains an unsolved problem. Here we present a new approach using a minimal model comprising spinal cord, sensory and motor cortex, coupled by long conne
Thalamic relay cells fire action potentials that transmit information from retina to cortex. The amount of information that spike trains encode is usually estimated from the precision of spike timing with respect to the stimulus. Sensory input, howev
The reconstruction mechanisms built by the human auditory system during sound reconstruction are still a matter of debate. The purpose of this study is to refine the auditory cortex model introduced in [9], and inspired by the geometrical modelling o
How natural communication sounds are spatially represented across the inferior colliculus, the main center of convergence for auditory information in the midbrain, is not known. The neural representation of the acoustic stimuli results from the inter
In the realm of motor control, artificial agents cannot match the performance of their biological counterparts. We thus explore a neural control architecture that is both biologically plausible, and capable of fully autonomous learning. The architect