Theta-burst stimulation of the right neocerebellar vermis selectively disrupts the practice-induced acceleration of lexical decisions.

Citation

Argyropoulos GP, Kimiskidis VK & Papagiannopoulos S (2011) Theta-burst stimulation of the right neocerebellar vermis selectively disrupts the practice-induced acceleration of lexical decisions.. Behavioral Neuroscience, 125 (5), pp. 724-734. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025134

Abstract
The present study reports an experiment of cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation in a lexical decision task. In contrast to the study by Argyropoulos (2011), no effect of cerebellar stimulation was observed on priming sizes. However, when subjects confronted the same stimuli in the second session of participation, lexical decision latencies did not become any shorter after stimulation of the right neocerebellar vermis, in contrast to all other conditions. This finding is discussed in the light of current research in cerebellar cognitive and linguistic functions, and provides some first evidence for the recently entertained hypothesis that neocerebellar loci are significant in acquiring, storing, and retrieving associative memory traces of repeatedly co-occurring neural events in the language domain.

Keywords
neocerebellum; vermis; TMS; automatization; prediction

Journal
Behavioral Neuroscience: Volume 125, Issue 5

People

Dr Georgios Argyropoulos

Lecturer in Psychology, Psychology