The Role of GABA in Human Motor Learning

By C. J. Stagg, Velicia Bachtiar, Heidi Johansen-Berg. Current Biology, 2011

595 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary GABA modification plays an important role in motor cortical plasticity [1–4]. We therefore hypothesized that interindividual variation in the responsiveness of the GABA system to modification influences learning capacity in healthy adults. We assessed GABA responsiveness by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), an intervention known to decrease GABA [5, 6]. The magnitude of M1 GABA decrease induced by anodal tDCS correlated positively with both the degree of motor learning and the degree of fMRI signal change within the left M1 during learning. This study therefore suggests that the responsiveness of the GABAergic system to modification may be relevant to short-term motor learning behavior and learning-related brain activity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a8072f26ca9b70d72e8434ce2b234cb8731db7b

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1. Richard A. E. Edden
2. Ashley D. Harris
3. Nicolaas A. J. Puts
4. Peter B. Barker
5. C. John Evans
6. R. Simpson

Citations in the corpus

• Gannet: A Batch-Processing Tool for the Quantitative Analysis of Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid–Edited MR Spectroscopy Spectra (2013, methodology): “Several alternative approaches have been applied in the literature (5,14,17,30–32); here we consider a Gaussian doublet with fixed splitting, a Gaussian doublet with variable splitting and two free Gaussian signals.”