Computer-aided and Mental Trainings Induced Plasticity of Sensorimotor Cortex in Patients Born Without Upper Limbs

Patients will receive 36 trainings (12 weeks with 3 trainings a week) of mental, kinesthetic reaching-to-grasp movement. During each training session they will perform 3 practice trials by following the instructions, after practicing 3 trials, the instructions will be discontinued, and subjects will perform 30 mental movements by following auditory cues.

Patients will receive 36 trainings (12 weeks with 3 trainings a week) of visual feedback of reaching-to-grasp movement. During each training session they will be sitting on a chair, in front of a computer screen observing simple tasks of reaching and precision fine grasping of a small object with 4 fingers of virtual upper extremity using the visualization software that will be coded specifically for the purpose of this experiment.

Patients will receive 36 trainings (12 weeks with 3 trainings a week) of mental, kinesthetic reaching-to-grasp movement that will be supplemented by visual feedback of this task by the visualization software that will be coded specifically for the purpose of this experiment (they will receive trainings that link the features of the two mentioned above types of training (MT and CAT).

Healthy controls without any kind of training