Grants 2017: Dr. Carlsen awarded NSERC Discovery Grant

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has awarded Anthony Carlsen a 5-year discovery grant to support his program of research. The reshttps://neuromotor.ca/people/earch proposal, entitled “Examining the nature of distributed neural contributions to motor preparation and initiation,” aims to determine the brain regions involved in preparing for upcoming actions.…

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Publication: A broadband acoustic stimulus is more likely than a pure tone to elicit a startle reflex and prepared movements

PDF  In order to be able to confidently assert that any RT speeding following a startling acoustic stimulus (SAS) is the result of activation in subcortical areas related to the startle reflex, a reliable indication that a startle reflex actually occurred is required. While the eye-blink response is typically used…

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Publication: Inhibition of motor-related activation during a simple reaction time task requiring visuomotor mental rotation

PDF  Seminal work by Georgopoulos and colleagues (1987) showed that reaction time (RT) increased when a rotational mental transformation had to be calculated prior to responding. A loud acoustic stimulus can be used to trigger prepared responses, so this effect was used in the current experiment to determine how preparatory activation levels in…

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Publication: Using TMS to reveal cortical excitability during preparation for a RT task.

PDF  This study investigated the entirety of the timecourse of cortico-spinal excitability changes during a reaction time task – from the time in between trials, and throughout the foreperiod and response interval. The results show a pattern of increase in excitability that occurs just after the “get ready” signal which…

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