Marleen Schoenfeld: Investigating phase synchrony of sensorimotor cortices while learning a novel bimanual motor task  

Please let me know if you have any further questions. Best wishes, Marleen

Hi Marleen, thanks a lot for the nice poster presentation! Could you explain why you chose an inter-subject design instead of an intra-subject design? And why did you choose 90 degree offset as one of the stimulation conditions? Thanks, Bettina

Hi Bettina,

thank you for your question and sorry to reply so late – I did not see your post earlier.

We chose a between-subject design because tACS was applied during learning. In a within-subject design, participants would have learned the task after the first session (as our results confirm) and would have plateaued their performance, potentially without any further learning, in a second session.

We used a 90° phase shift between hemisphere, meaning that one hemisphere was stimulated with 0° phase shift and the other with a 90° phase shift. We specifically used a 90° instead of 180° phase shift because the 180° phase shift would entail the direct opposite of 0° and might therefore be still in ‘line’ with the phase underlying neural activation pattern just with a reversed polarity. However, we wanted to stimulate out of phase and not be in ‘line’ with the phase.

Thank you for getting in touch and let me know if you have any further questions.

Best wishes,

Marleen

Great, thanks so much for your answer. That definitely makes sense. Very best wishes, Bettina