EoA performance was assessed approximately 5 min after practice with tDCS ended. On Day 2 of the experimental session, the participants were tested for retention of the practiced sequence. Fifty random trials were also presented at baseline, EoA and at Day 2 of retention, Ixazomib molecular weight to control for changes in the reaction time due to changes in visuospatial processing speed over practice. Within these random trials there was no repeating sequence. A more specific measure of implicit

sequence learning was obtained by contrasting the sequential response times against those response times for the random trials. To ensure that the participants did not have explicit knowledge of the motor sequences, they were asked if they noticed any pattern after Day 2 of testing. Three of 12 participants reported that they thought that some pattern was repeating, but could not explicitly recall more than three serial elements of the sequence when asked to reproduce it (i.e. no free recall). One additional participant was able to recall five items of the ten-item sequence on the free-recall test, and was therefore excluded from further analysis. TMS was employed to localize

the M1 location for FDI muscle. Participants were seated in a comfortable chair with the forearm supported in a prone position and hand resting on an arm support. Single TMS pulses were applied over the 5-FU cell line right motor cortex with a 70-mm figure-of-eight coil attached to a Magstim Rapid Stimulator (The Magstim Company, Wales, UK). The coil was held tangentially to the scalp with the handle pointing posteriorly away from the midline at an angle of ∼45 °. Cortical current induced from this position is directed approximately perpendicular to the central sulcus (Brasil- Neto et al., 1992; Mills et al., 1992). A ‘hot-spot’ for FDI was determined as the site at which the largest motor evoked potential was obtained from FDI at lowest

selleckchem TMS intensity. This hotspot overlies the area of the M1 that more heavily projects to the FDI, and was the site for M1 tDCS. For the premotor cortex, the tDCS active electrode was positioned 3 cm anterior and 1 cm medial to the hot-spot (Boros et al., 2008). tDCS was delivered at 1 mA current intensity using a constant-current stimulator (Dupel Iontophoresis System, Empi, MN, USA) using an 8-cm2 saline-soaked anode and a self-adhesive carbonized cathode (48 cm2) placed over the forehead above the contralateral orbit. For active tDCS conditions, the current was ramped up over 10 s, held constant at 1 mA for 15 min and then ramped down over 10 s. For the sham tDCS, the current was ramped up for 10 s and then the machine was switched off. All the participants tolerated tDCS very well and there no adverse effects were reported. Only reaction times (RTs) for correct trials were included in the analysis. RTs longer than 2.