Noninvasive cortical stimulation enhances motor skill acquisition over multiple days through an effect on consolidation

Motor skills can take weeks to months to acquire and can diminish over time in the absence of continued practice. Thus, strategies that enhance skill acquisition or retention are of great scientific and practical interest. Here we investigated the effect of noninvasive cortical stimulation on the extended time course of learning a novel and challenging motor skill task. A skill measure was chosen to reflect shifts in the task's speed-accuracy tradeoff function (SAF), which prevented us from falsely interpreting variations in position along an unchanged SAF as a change in skill. Subjects practiced over 5 consecutive days while receiving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the primary motor…

• AH
  American Heart Association
• AV
  Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• NI
  National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
• NI
  National Institute of Child Health and Human Development