Accoppiamento Bimanuale e Stimolazione Magnetica Transcranica Ripetitiva: Studio sulla Modulazione Dell'area Pre-Supplementare Motoria

In the last decades, neuroscience has often faced the Bi-manual Coupling matter and studied the areas of the brain involved in this important human ability. Many studies are about a series of brain areas, whose simultaneous activation during bi-manual task led to think that we'd better talk about a network of areas instead of a single one involved in bi-manual coupling. Almost all of the studies which deal with this issue conducted experiments on primates and patients who had their corpus callosum damaged, showing how important this part of the brain is in bi-manual coupling, in particular in the spatial one. This piece of work is supposed to give a contribution to the studies about the importance and the role played by every singular area, activating in human bi-manual coupling; it deals specifically with the pre-supplementary motor area, whose activation in this particular task is widely documented. Experimental paradigm used during the tests is that of circles and lines, in a real circumstance and in imaginative one. Then it goes on with the inhibition obtained by transcranic magnetic simulation of the pre-supplementary motor area, which is followed by a repetition of the task according to a classical experimental design. The analysis takes into account the ovalization index of circles and lines, and most to the effects of inhibitory stimulation on this, comparing patients' PRE and POST performances. By the way, results disagree with expectations: no evident modulation of the ovalization index has been recorded.