R Christopher Miall

University of Birmingham · School of Psychology

The human nervous system displays such plasticity that we can adapt our motor behavior to various changes in environmental or body properties. However, how sensorimotor adaptation generalizes to new situations and new effectors, and which factors influence the underlying mechanisms, remains unclear. Here we tested the general hypothesis that differ...

Background The cerebellum and primary motor cortex (M1) are crucial to coordinated and accurate movements of the upper limbs. There is also appreciable evidence that these two structures exert somewhat divergent influences upon proximal versus distal upper limb control. Here, we aimed to differentially regulate the contribution of cerebellum and M1...

Previous work has highlighted the role of haptic feedback for manual dexterity, in particular for the control of precision grip forces between the index finger and thumb. It is unclear how fine motor skills involving more than just two digits might be affected, especially given that loss of sensation from the hand affects many neurological patients...

Key points: The application of conventional cryogenic magnetoencephalography (MEG) to the study of cerebellar functions is highly limited because typical cryogenic sensor arrays are far away from the cerebellum and naturalistic movement is not allowed in the recording. A new generation of MEG using optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) that can be...

The original article [1] contained a minor error in the following sentence in the Discussion:

During normal healthy ageing there is a decline in the ability to control simple movements, characterised by increased reaction times, movement durations and variability. There is also growing evidence of age-related proprioceptive loss which may contribute to these impairments. However, this relationship has not been studied in detail for the uppe...

Despite wide evidence suggesting anatomical and functional interactions between cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia, the learning processes operating within them —often viewed as respectively unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning— are studied in isolation, neglecting their strong interdependence. We discuss how those brain areas form...

Perception can prime action (visuomotor priming), and action can prime perception (motorvisual priming). According to ideomotor theory both effects rely on the overlap of mental representations between perception and action. This implies that both effects get more pronounced the more features they share. We tested this hypothesis by employing in a...

We test the feasibility of an optically pumped magnetometer (OPM)-MEG system for the measurement of human cerebellar activity. We show that the OPM system allows for excellent coverage of this structure by decreasing the average sensor-to-cerebellum distance by around 33% (16mm), compared to a standard MEG helmet. This closer proximity to the cereb...

Chronic upper limb impairment is often caused by central or peripheral nerve damage. Patients undergo a series of assessments prior, during and following treatment. Treatments can range from physiotherapy to surgical intervention, however, assessments are often limited to a small range of tests, including subjective ratings and movement imitation t...

During normal healthy ageing there is a decline in the ability to control simple movements, characterised by increased reaction times, movement durations and variability. There is also growing evidence of age-related proprioceptive loss which may contribute to these impairments. However this relationship has not been studied in detail for the upper...

When navigating in a spatial environment or when hearing its description, we can develop a mental model which may be represented in the central nervous system in different coordinate systems such as an egocentric or allocentric reference frame. The way in which sensory experience influences the preferred reference frame has been studied with a part...

It is uncertain how vision and proprioception contribute to adaptation of voluntary arm movements. In normal participants, adaptation to imposed forces is possible with or without vision, suggesting that proprioception is sufficient; in participants with proprioceptive loss (PL), adaptation is possible with visual feedback, suggesting that proprioc...

During normal healthy ageing there is a deterioration in motor control which is characterized by increased reaction times, movement durations and kinematic variability. This is thought to be due to a multi-factorial process of general sensorimotor system decline, yet the extent to which proprioceptive sensory loss contributes to age-related motor i...

A correction has been published and is appended to both the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Anodal cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is known to enhance motor learning, and therefore, has been suggested to hold promise as a therapeutic intervention. However, the neural mechanisms underpinning the effects of cerebellar tDCS are currently unknown. We investigated the neural changes associated with cerebellar tDCS usi...

Background Chronic upper limb motor impairment is a common outcome of stroke. Therapeutic training can reduce motor impairment. Recently, a growing interest in evaluating motor training provided by robotic assistive devices has emerged. Robot-assisted therapy is attractive because it provides a means of increasing practice intensity without increas...

There is a continuing debate about control of voluntary movement, with conflicted evidence about the balance between control of movement vectors (amplitude control) that implies knowledge of the starting position for accuracy, and equilibrium point or final position control, that is independent of the starting conditions. We tested wrist flexion an...

Late in his life Rodin produced many thousand “instant drawings.” He asked models to make natural energetic movements, and he would draw them at high speed without looking at his hand or paper. To help understand his “blind drawing” process, the authors tracked the eye and hand movements of art students while they drew blind, copying complex lines...

The 'quiet eye' (QE)-a period of extended gaze fixation on a target-has been reported in many tasks that require accurate aiming. Longer quiet eye durations (QEDs) are reported in experts compared to non-experts and on successful versus less successful trials. The QE has been extensively studied in the field; however, the cognitive mechanisms under...

Mounting evidence indicates that posterolateral portions of the cerebellum (right Crus I/II) contribute to language processing, but the nature of this role remains unclear. Based on a well-supported theory of cerebellar motor function, which ascribes to the cerebellum a role in short-term prediction through internal modeling, we hypothesize that ri...

Early detection of the behavioural deficits of neurodegenerative diseases may help to describe the pathogenesis of such diseases and establish important biomarkers of disease progression. The aim of this study was to identify how sensorimotor adaptation of the upper limb, a cerebellar-dependent process restoring movement accuracy after introduction...

BACKGROUND - Recently, it has been reported that proprioceptive acuity measured during passive wrist movement in the elderly is not predictive of their active motor performance (Helsen et al. 2016). Here, we used a 2D robotic manipulandum device to investigate whether dynamic proprioceptive acuity could better predict reaching motor performance in...

Over the past 30 years, cumulative evidence has indicated that cerebellar function extends beyond sensorimotor control. This view has emerged from studies of neuroanatomy, neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and brain stimulation, with the results implicating the cerebellum in domains as diverse as attention, language, executive function, and social cog...

Cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (ctDCS) is known to enhance adaptation to a novel visual rotation (visuomotor adaptation), and it is suggested to hold promise as a therapeutic intervention. However, it is unknown whether this effect is robust across varying task parameters. This question is crucial if ctDCS is to be used clinical...

Despite increasing evidence suggesting the cerebellum works in concert with the cortex and basal ganglia, the nature of the reciprocal interactions between these three brain regions remains unclear. This consensus paper gathers diverse recent views on a variety of important roles played by the cerebellum within the cerebello-basal ganglia-thalamo-c...

The theoretical basis for the association between high working memory capacity (WMC) and enhanced visuomotor adaptation is unknown. Visuomotor adaptation involves interplay between explicit and implicit systems. We examined whether the positive association between adaptation and WMC is specific to the explicit component of adaptation. Experiment 1...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a method of non-invasive brain stimulation widely used to modulate cognitive functions. Recent studies, however, suggests that effects are unreliable, small and often non-significant at least when stimulation is applied in a single session to healthy individuals. We examined the effects of frontal a...

Prolonged exposure to movement perturbations leads to creation of motor memories which decay towards previous states when the perturbations are removed. However, it remains unclear whether this decay is due only to a spontaneous and passive recovery of the previous state. It has recently been reported that activation of reinforcement-based learning...

It has been postulated recently that the cerebellum contributes the same prediction and learning functions to linguistic processing as it does towards motor control. For example, repetitive TMS over posterior-lateral cerebellum caused a significant loss in predictive language processing, as assessed by the latency of saccades to target items of spo...

The localization of motor functions within the cerebral cortex has a long history, dating back to the demonstration in 1870 by Fritsch and Hitzig that weak electrical stimulation of the cortex of the dog could evoke movements of the contralateral limbs. At about the same time, Hughlings Jackson made careful clinical observations of the convolutions...

Physiological studies of the pathways from the brain and midbrain to the spinal cord have a very long history, from Sherrington and other key investigators around the turn of the nineteenth century. Much of this early knowledge has informed and provided a platform on which more recent understanding of the motor hierarchy is built.

Much of our understanding of the capabilities of the lower spinal circuits has been developed by studying the effects of removing these higher levels of control, following accidents and trauma in patients or by experimental transection of the spinal cord or brain stem in laboratory animals.

The full range of basal ganglia functions is still uncertain, but they are principally concerned with the release and suppression of cortically generated movements. They are phylogenetically old, being present in all vertebrates including the reptiles, which have essentially no neocortex. It is likely therefore that their function was originally re...

The cerebellum is the largest motor structure in the CNS and, in humans, contains more neurons than the whole of the cerebral cortex. It occupies about one tenth of the skull cavity, sitting astride the brain stem beneath the occipital cortex (Fig. 1). A great deal is now known about its circuitry and microphysiology. It contains only six main cell...

Scientists who have examined the gaze strategies employed by athletes have determined that longer quiet eye (QE) durations (QED) are characteristic of skilled compared to less-skilled performers. However, the cognitive mechanisms of the QE and, specifically, how the QED affects performance are not yet fully understood. We review research that has e...

Humans can remarkably adapt their motor behavior to novel environmental conditions, yet it remains unclear which factors enable us to transfer what we have learned with one limb to the other. Here we tested the hypothesis that interlimb transfer of sensorimotor adaptation is determined by environmental conditions but also by individual characterist...

Cerebellar contributions to language are presently poorly understood, but it has been argued that the cerebellar role in motor learning can be extended to learning in cognitive and linguistic domains. Here, we used fMRI to investigate whether the cerebellum is recruited in mapping novel words onto existing semantic concepts. On separate days, parti...

We previously speculated that depression of cerebellar excitability using cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) might release extra cognitive resources via the disinhibition of activity in prefrontal cortex. The objective of the present study was to investigate whether anodal tDCS over the prefrontal cortex could similarly improve...

The posterior vermis of the cerebellum is considered to be critically involved in saccadic adaptation. However, recent evidence suggests that the adaptive decrease (backward adaptation) and the adaptive increase (forward adaptation) of saccade amplitude rely on partially separate neural substrates. We investigated whether the posterior cerebellum c...

Objective: The functional connectivity pattern of Resting State Networks (RSNs) identifies separate motor and non-motor connections between the cerebellum and the cerebrum using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The extent to which whole brain RSNs are reorganized after cerebellar damage is little understood, yet would be useful for eva...

Motor adaptation is an error dependant form of learning that allows the motor system to flexibly alter motor commands in face of a noisy environment. Researches often test this ability by asking participants to make reaching movements as velocity dependant force fields impose deviations to their motor commands. Movements initially appear highly dev...

A new study shows that two skills that would otherwise interfere can be learned if each has a unique following action, and that a single skill is learned more quickly if the goal of the subsequent action is consistent across trials. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The cerebellum is critical for both motor and cognitive control. Dysfunction of the cerebellum is a component of multiple neurological disorders. In recent years, interventions have been developed that aim to excite or inhibit the activity and function of the human cerebellum. Transcranial direct current stimulation of the cerebellum (ctDCS) promis...

The CogLaboration project (http://coglaboration.eu/) was launched in 2011, as part of the EU FT7-ICT agenda for the development of service robot-ics and focuses on the fluent handover of objects between a robot and a human, which is considered to be a key requirement for providing successful and effi-cient robotic assistance to humans. The project...

Background While transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil geometry has important effects on the evoked magnetic field, no study has systematically examined how different coil designs alter the effectiveness of cerebellar stimulation. Hypothesis The depth of the cerebellar targets will limit efficiency. Angled coils designed to stimulate deeper...

To copy a natural visual image as a line drawing, visual identification and extraction of features in the image must be guided by top-down decisions, and is usually influenced by prior knowledge. In parallel with other behavioural studies testing the relationship between eye and hand movements when drawing, we report here a functional brain imaging...

Alternating the point of gaze between an original (model or sitter, object, or scene) and a picture (paper, canvas, or digital touch screen) is the most common observational drawing strategy. However, a number of investigations into eye–hand interactions in drawing have revealed the existence of some “blind” drawing taking place (drawing the pictur...

Numerous studies have highlighted the possibility of modulating the excitability of cerebro-cerebellar circuits bi-directionally using transcranial electrical brain stimulation, in a manner akin to that observed using magnetic stimulation protocols. It has been proposed that cerebellar stimulation activates Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex,...

Previous studies have reported functionally localized changes in resting-state brain activity following a short period of motor learning, but their relationship with memory consolidation and their dependence on the form of learning is unclear. We investigate these questions with implicit or explicit variants of the serial reaction time task (SRTT)....

The cerebellum is the largest motor structure in the CNS and, in humans, contains more neurons than the whole of the cerebral cortex. It occupies about one tenth of the skull cavity, sitting astride the brain stem beneath the occipital cortex (Fig. 38.1). A great deal is now known about its circuitry and microphysiology. It contains only six main c...

The full range of basal ganglia functions is still uncertain, but they are principally concerned with the release and suppression of cortically generated movements. They are phylogenetically old, being present in all vertebrates including the reptiles, which have essentially no neocortex. It is likely therefore that their function was originally re...

Physiological studies of the pathways from the brain and midbrain to the spinal cord have a very long history, from Sherrington and other key investigators around the turn of the nineteenth century. Much of this early knowledge has informed and provided a platform on which more recent understanding of the motor hierarchy is built.

The localization of motor functions within the cerebral cortex has a long history, dating back to the demonstration in 1870 by Fritsch and Hitzig that weak electrical stimulation of the cortex of the dog could evoke movements of the contralateral limbs. At about the same time, Hughlings Jackson made careful clinical observations of the convolutions...

Much of our understanding of the capabilities of the lower spinal circuits has been developed by studying the effects of removing these higher levels of control, following accidents and trauma in patients or by experimental transection of the spinal cord or brain stem in laboratory animals.

A study reports that a metabolic measure of synaptic activity in the motor cortex becomes dissociated from neural firing rates after extensive practice in a behavioral task, suggesting an increase in efficacy of synaptic inputs.

The field of neurostimulation of the cerebellum either with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS; single pulse or repetitive (rTMS)) or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS; anodal or cathodal) is gaining popularity in the scientific community, in particular because these stimulation techniques are non-invasive and provide novel informat...

Research on action understanding in cognitive neuroscience has led to the identification of a wide "action understanding network" mainly encompassing parietal and premotor cortical areas. Within this cortical network mirror neurons are critically involved implementing a neural mechanism according to which, during action understanding, observed acti...

Recent studies have demonstrated that following learning tasks, changes in the resting state activity of the brain shape regional connections in functionally specific circuits. Here we expand on these findings by comparing changes induced in the resting state immediately following four motor tasks. Two groups of participants performed a visuo-motor...

Supplementary material

The central nervous system (CNS), in order to accurately control the movements we perform, needs to be constantly informed about the state of the motor apparatus. However, the quality of the control is challenged by several factors like biological noise and delays. It is widely believed that the CNS overcomes these challenges by calculating an esti...

Neuroimaging studies have improved our understanding of which brain structures are involved in motor learning. Despite this, questions remain regarding the areas that contribute consistently across paradigms with different task demands. For instance, sensorimotor tasks focus on learning novel movement kinematics and dynamics, while serial response...