Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Skilled object grasping and manipulation is a basic requirement for many daily tasks and as a consequence, the loss of manipulation skill--which often occurs following stroke and neurological disease--can be particularly devastating. The central aim of the proposed research program is to understand, using a multi-disciplinary neuroscience approach that combines behavioural, functional MRI (fMRI) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) methods, how and where in the human brain object grasping and manipulation tasks are planned and controlled. This is important because our current understanding of the neural bases underlying these behaviours remains quite limited. The proposed research will be divided into two separate, yet complementary, projects. Project 1 will use cutting-edge fMRI methods to fully map and characterize how object grasping and manipulation tasks are encoded both at the level of single areas and whole-brain cortical networks. This will establish a network of key brain areas containing activity coding these object-oriented behaviours. Next, to explore the causal role of these fMRI-defined areas in the planning and control of object grasping and manipulation we will then use state-of-the-art rTMS methods to disrupt their activity and determine the resulting effects on the production of behaviour. This combined fMRI-TMS approach will fully characterize the neural activity of brain areas involved in manipulation tasks and how perturbing that activity affects behaviour. Knowledge gained from this research can be used to better characterize and understand sensorimotor dysfunction resulting from neurological diseases and stroke and devise better therapies for rehabilitation. The proposed research will also aid the development of patient-controlled brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) by identifying key candidate human brain regions in which neural signals specifying the control of object grasping and manipulation tasks can be recorded.