MRI-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation on artificial centre embedding grammars

The human capacity to implicitly acquire knowledge of structured patterns has
recently been studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) and it
was found that classification performance related to the left inferior frontal
region (Brodmann*s area [BA] 45).

The two main objectives of this experiment is firstly to replicate the finding
that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the inferior
frontal cortex (IFC) can interfere with artificial syntactic classification and
secondly to investigate whether subject can implicitly acquire the embedded
recursive structure in grammatical strings.

The investigation spans over 5 days of acquisition by exposure to grammatical
exemplars from the formal grammar. On day five, repetetive trasncranial
magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is applied while classification behaviour is
studied. Two sesstion of rTMS classification while be given, one in the morning
and one in the afternoon, to the left and to the right inferior frontal cortex
respectively, in order to wash out possible carry-over effects.

TMS itself is not painful or invasive. However, some test persons complain
about a (light) headache some time after the stimulation. Unwanted side-effects
has never been described with the stimulation parameters used in this study.