News and events

Ronan received a 3-year fellowship from FNRS, July 2024

Congratulations to Ronan who was awarded a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship grant by Le Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique!

Ronan’s project is concerned with identifying neural sources of preparatory inhibition. The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in combination with Instructed Delay Choice Reaction Time Tasks in humans has led to the discovery of preparation related suppression of corticospinal tract excitability, so-called “preparatory suppression”. Despite these advances, motor evoked potentials (MEPs) produced by single pulse TMS over primary motor cortex (M1) have a limited ability to test competing perspectives on the functional role of preparatory suppression since they represent a summed approximation of many sources of inhibition and facilitation within the brain. Ronan has proposed a set of experiments organized in 3 work packages (WP) using TMS and electroencephalography (EEG) and transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) to improve understanding of the neural source of preparatory suppression. Ronan believes this will aid in future efforts to parse out the function(s) of the effect in behaviour, for both healthy and clinical populations.