Patterns of Normal Human Brain Plasticity After Practice and Their Implications for Neurorehabilitation

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Kelly C, Foxe JJ, Garavan H. Patterns of normal human brain plasticity after practice and their implications for neurorehabilitation. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2006;87(12 Suppl 2):S20-9.Objectives: To illustrate how our knowledge about normal patterns of experience-induced plasticity can provide insights into the mechanisms of neurorehabilitation; to provide an overview of the practice-effects literature in order to simplify and amalgamate a large number of heterogeneous findings and identify typical patterns of practice effects and their determining factors; and to concentrate on the impact of practice on higher cognitive functions, such as working memory, and present some preliminary but promising behavioral data that show how practice on a complex cognitive task can benefit cognitive functioning more generally.Data Sources: We performed a systematic search for peerreviewed journal articles using computerized databases (PubMed, ISI Web of Science, PsycINFO).Data Selection: Neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or positron-emission tomography (PET) to examine functional activation changes as a result of practice on sensory, motor, or cognitive tasks in normal (healthy) populations were included in the review. Further studies were identified that examined the effects of rehabilitative training on functional activations in clinical populations using fMRI or PET.Data Extraction: Important characteristics of the selected studies were summarized in a systematic manner so to enable the extraction of specific factors impacting on the pattern of practice effects observed.Data Synthesis: We identified a number of factors that impact on the patterns of practice effects observed and discuss how the insights gained from the study of healthy populations can by applied to rehabilitation of cognitive deficits in clinical populations.Conclusions: Progress in our understanding of neurorehabilitative plasticity will be enabled by neuroimaging examinations of cognitive rehabilitation training grounded in a knowledge of normal (healthy) patterns of brain activation and practice-induced plasticity.Key Words: Neuronal plasticity; Rehabilitation. © 2006 by the American Congress of Rehabilitation MedicineT HE DISCOVERY THAT experience-driven changes in the human brain can occur from a synaptic to a cortical level throughout the life span has been termed a nascent revolution in cognitive neuroscience, 1 overthrowing the long-held belief that the adult brain is hard-wired and resistant to change. 2Research with both animal models and humans has shown that the organization of the adult cerebral cortex can change substantially as a result of practice and experience.3,4 Furthermore, experience-dependent change can occur at multiple levels of the central nervous system, from the molecular or synaptic level to the level of cortical maps and large-scale neural networks.2 These discoveries challenge us to investigate how it is that the brain changes in response to experience. Moreover, if the neuroanatom...

Plastic modifications within inhibitory control networks induced by practicing a stop-signal task: An electrical neuroimaging study

“…A putative neurophysiological mechanism accounting for the direction of our effect is that practice yielded to the exclusion of irrelevant neural activity, in turn increasing the selectivity and thus the efficiency of the neural activity (Kelly and Garavan, 2005). In line with our results, decreases in frontal activity are typically reported following training on tasks involving high-order executive function as the one used in the current study (Beauchamp et al, 2003;Hempel et al, 2004), whereas increases in the activity within task-relevant brain regions were observed following training with lower-level motor or sensory tasks (Kelly et al, 2006). However, as mentioned above, we cannot rule out that changes in response strategies or in motivation during the SST practice impacted the SSRT and thus also account for the decrease in rIFG activity.…”

Enhancing frontal top-down inhibitory control with Go/NoGo training

“…Putative accounts for this pattern of result include a sharpening of the neural populations implementing the inhibition by the exclusion of neurons less specifically involved in the process (Logothetis et al 2001;Kelly et al 2006;Johansen-Berg et al 2012;Zatorre et al 2012). The resulting decrease in task-irrelevant activity would have in turn enabled a speeding up of the inhibition process and improved IC proficiency.…”

Task‐specific training: evidence for and translation to clinical practice

“…However, the authors would suggest that this body of evidence serves to validate the focus of occupations, tasks and activities in neuromotor interventions. Suffi ce to say that researchers and opinion leaders are in agreement that there is ample evidence to support neuromotor interventions, which are task specifi c and based in and around everyday activities (Blennerhassett and Dite, 2004;Mathiowetz, 2004;Bayona et al, 2005;Dobkin and Carmichael, 2005;Teasell et al, 2005;Kelly et al, 2006). In this context, we may defi ne task-specifi c training as: training or intervention which utilizes, as its principal therapeutic medium, ordinary everyday activities which are intrinsically and/or extrinsically meaningful to the patient or client.…”

“…If the patient's interest and motivation are to be maintained, task-specifi c interventions should be in the context of eventual mastery of a whole task that has been identifi ed as relevant. Further, interventions should include complex tasks as a means of involving more regions of the brain in the reorganization response (Mathiowetz, 2004;Davis, 2006;Kelly et al, 2006;Krakauer, 2006). …”