Figure 1.
Experimental procedure and behavioral results.
A) Participants were instructed to practice sequential finger-tapping movements for five consecutive days. Pre- and post-training behavioral tests were conducted to measure the improvement of behavioral performance in finger tapping. FMRI scans were conducted before and after motor training to examine the learning-induced changes in neural activation. B) Behavioral performance was measured as the number of correct sequential finger-tapping movements per 30 sec for both the trained and untrained sequences occurring before and after motor training. The error bars indicate ±1 standard error of the mean (S.E.M.).
Figure 2.
A) The right primary motor area (M1) that corresponds to the trained left hand from a typical participant (MNI coordinates: x = 40, y = −14, z = 46; t value = 18.3). M1 was defined as the intersection between the functional activation in the localizer scan and the anatomic M1 label in the Juelich Histological Atlas. B) Learning-induced changes in the stability of activation patterns in the M1 for both trained and untrained sequences. C) Learning-induced changes in the mean magnitudes of neural activation for both the trained and untrained sequences. The error bars indicate ±1 S.E.M. An asterisk indicates p<0.05.
Figure 3.
A cluster of voxels in the right M1 show the increased stability of the activation pattern for the trained sequence (MNI coordinates: x = 52; y = −18; z = 58; t value = 4.76). The inset figure shows the overlap between the cluster identified by the searchlight analysis and the M1 identified in the localizer scan (outlined in cyan).