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Abstract:
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to
investigate the perception of visual motion in three experiments.
In the first experiment 1-10Hz stimulation at 0.6-2 T was
sequentially delivered at different cranial locations until
subjects reported seeing moving phosphenes. In experiment 2, 10-Hz
TMS at the same site disrupted the motion after-effect but not the
colour after-effect, suggesting that the site of stimulation was
over V5. In experiment 3 TMS was applied to subjects while they
learned a visual motion task. After training, subjects were tested
without stimulation. Subjects who had received stimulation at 3Hz
performed significantly worse than either unstimulated subjects or
subjects stimulated at 10Hz. These results suggest that TMS-induced
moving phosphenes can be used to identify V5. Furthermore, TMS of
V5 affected learning in a frequency-specific manner, analogous to
that seen in a motor-learning task (Pascual-Leone et al., In
Press), suggesting that findings from the motor system can be
generalized to other systems.
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