BACKGROUND:A standardised tool for comprehensive reporting can improve transparency, support consistent documentation, and enable comparison across transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies. To date, the most used reporting checklist lacks definitions of full reporting and was not initially evaluated for usability or reliability. METHODS:We developed the TMS Reporting Assessment Tool (TMS-RAT), a comprehensive reporting framework that provides clear definitions and examples for its items. We tested the usability and reliability of the TMS-RAT by rating all studies published between 1987 and 31st January 2025 using afferent conditioning (n = 333), protocols that encompass many reporting categories identified during tool development. Seventeen independent raters contributed across three development phases, a validation phase, and a retest phase, with naïve raters introduced in each phase. Iterative refinements of the tool were informed by inter-rater reliability, qualitative rater feedback, and consultation with external TMS experts. RESULTS:We present two versions of the tool: the 72-item TMS-RAT v1.0, designed to guide comprehensive reporting, and the TMS-RAT v1.1, a subset of 50 items with the highest inter-rater (overall AC1 = 0.78, range = [0.60-0.99]) and test-retest reliability (overall AC1 = 0.82, range = [0.65-1.0]), intended for retrospective evaluation of reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The tool has not been validated outside the afferent conditioning literature or on studies not recording motor evoked potentials. CONCLUSION:The TMS-RAT is a comprehensive, reliable tool that seeks to improve transparency and reproducibility in TMS research. We aim to extend the tool to cover additional TMS protocols.

In response to Gelman and Brown’s recent critique of Aungle and Langer (2023), we argue that their article illustrates how narrow statistical reasoning and selective literature review can misrepresent and undermine credible scientific findings. Using their discussion of perceived time and physical healing as a case study, we identify three general problems: (a) a failure to accurately characterize the methods and results of the study they critique, (b) misinterpretations and omissions in their review of the relevant literature, and (c) a tendency to generalize from isolated statistical issues to sweeping claims about the invalidity of mind-body research. We adopt Gelman and Brown’s recommended model and find that the main effect remains robust. We also document errors in their interpretations of other cited studies and demonstrate that they ignore decades of rigorous, well-replicated research on placebo effects and health mindsets. By examining their critique in detail, we highlight how methodological skepticism, when untethered from accurate reading and balanced appraisal, can mislead rather than clarify.

Chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) is a frequent side effect of a number of chemotherapeutic agents which are widely used in the treatment of common cancers. Sensory symptoms primarily affect the fingers and toes and include numbness, tingling and pain. However, there is limited understanding of how CIPN may impact manipulation skills. Questionnaire and focus group methods were used to explore the experience of CIPN side effects impacting manual activities in 25 self-selected participants recruited from a cancer charity web site advertisement. Participants' responses demonstrated varying degrees of impact of touch impairment associated with CIPN on the performance of manual activities involving bimanual, unimanual and directed touch. Examination of the components of the affected activities, together with participants' reports of alterations in their experience of touch, was used to generate hypotheses about why some manual tasks are more affected than others. In future research it is proposed that quantitative measures of manual activities should complement patient reported outcome measures in evaluating the mechanisms underlying issues in sensory motor control of manual activities caused by the effects of CIPN. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement This work was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC grant BB/R003971/1). The study has been delivered through the National Institute for Health and Care (NIHR) Birmingham Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: The Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Ethical Review Committee of the University of Birmingham gave ethical approval for this research. I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes All data produced in the present study are available upon reasonable request to the authors.

When trying to identify the colour of a target, people’s performance is impaired by nearby distractors of different colours. It is controversial whether these interference effects originate from competing stimuli, competing responses or from both simultaneously. These interference effects may also differ depending on a person’s age. Comparisons between studies show mixed results, while differences in experimental design and data analysis complicate the interpretation. In our study, we manipulated the relative proportions of congruent and incongruent trials with respect to both stimuli and responses. Considering this aspect, we asked whether people resolve stimulus and response interference differently at different ages. 92 children (6–14 years), 25 young adults (20–43 years) and 33 older adults (60–84 years) performed a coloured version of the Eriksen flanker task. Since reaction times and errors were correlated, inverse efficiency scores were used to address speed-accuracy trade-offs between groups. Absolute interference effects were used to measure relationships with age. The results showed first, unexpectedly, that response interference was comparable between stimulus- and response-balanced conditions. Second, performance at all ages was significantly influenced both by competing stimuli and responses. Most importantly, the size of interference effects decreased with age. These findings cast some doubt on the conclusions of previous studies, and raise further questions about how cognitive control is best measured across the lifespan.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is often described as having an effective spatial resolution of ∼10 mm, because of the limited area of the scalp on which TMS produces motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in resting muscles. We find that during natural hand movement TMS evokes MEPs from a much larger scalp area, in particular when stimulating over the supramarginal gyrus 55 mm away. Our results show that TMS can be effective at much larger distances than generally assumed.

Neurostimulation techniques are used to study the healthy humanHuman central and peripheral nervous system non-invasively by stimulating neural tissueTissues magnetically or electrically. Such approaches have been successfully applied to study the motor system as well as several other brainBrains systems. This chapter will focus on stimulation of the somatosensorySomatosensory systemSomatosensory experiments. Typically, neurostimulation is applied to a certain brainBrains area by positioning a coil (e.g., in transcranial magnetic stimulationTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), TMSTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)) or an electrodeElectrodes (e.g., transcranial electrical stimulation, TES) on the scalp location over the brainBrains area of interest. When primary motor cortexCortices (M1) is stimulated with TMSTranscranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), motor-evoked potentialsPotentials (MEPs) and twitches are observed in the targeted musclesMuscles of the body. However, unlike over M1, stimulation to somatosensorySomatosensory and other corticesCortices does not produce immediately observable outputs. This introduces problems of localizationLocalization and other challenges, such as the optimal experimental designs and behavioral tasks, when using neurostimulation to study tactileTactile perceptionPerception. This chapter will describe and evaluate these approaches. Practical and participant-specific difficulties will be noted. Neurostimulation methods offer relatively cheap and reliable means of modulating somatosensation, yet care is required to ensure that the experimental design is adequate, that the optimal location is stimulated, and that the data are able to answer your theoretical question.

Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author’s point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these ‘persuasive communication devices’ carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results. Here we discuss a list of persuasive communication devices and we encourage authors, as well as reviewers and editors, to think carefully about their use.

Detecting and discriminating touches on your fingertip and other highly sensitive body parts has been a paradigm in somatosensory science since the birth of psychophysics in the nineteenth century. By isolating a body part and applying discrete stimuli over many repetitions, the limits of somatosensation and bodily perception can be discovered. This chapter will focus on two methods of studying discriminative touch in the temporal and spatial domains: vibrotactile perception and spatial acuity. Different psychophysical approaches and experimental designs will be described and evaluated in terms of their validity, efficiency, and reliability. Practical and participant-specific difficulties will be noted. Vibrotactile and spatial acuity methods offer relatively cheap and reliable measures of somatosensation, often suitable for undergraduate student projects. Yet care and experimentation is required to ensure that the experimental design is adequate, and the data collection is sufficient to answer your theoretical question.

EDITORIAL article Front. Neurosci., 09 January 2023Sec. Perception Science Volume 16 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.1124062

This commentary is on the original article by Batschelett et al. on pages 1321–1331 of this issue.

Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author's point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these 'persuasive communication devices' carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results. Here we discuss a list of persuasive communication devices and we encourage authors, as well as reviewers and editors, to think carefully about their use.

The grating orientation discrimination task (GOT) is a sensitive and reliable measure of tactile spatial resolution, or acuity. We used the GOT in three experiments to investigate the effects of hand posture and hand visibility on spatial acuity. Participant sex and experimental design were also manipulated. Healthy adult participants received brief touches to their index fingertips of grated, domed objects. Their task was to decide whether the gratings ran 'along' or 'across' their finger. Measures of the smallest grating width for which participants could reliably discriminate between orientations were recorded as threshold. Experiment 1 evaluated the effect of two- versus one-interval discrimination, hand used and participant sex. Experiments 2 and 3 evaluated the effects of hand visibility (visible or covered) and hand posture (in front or to the side). Females were better than males; the two-interval task resulted in lower thresholds than the one-interval task; and left and right hand thresholds were not significantly different. Most importantly, while hand visibility did not have a significant effect on the task, thresholds were affected by hand posture—worse when the hand was oriented to the side of the body than in front. These results replicate previously reported effects of sex (or finger size), but failed to replicate the so-called ‘visual enhancement of touch’ (VET) effect. We also report a meta-analysis of 27 VET studies, finding a significant effect of ‘non-informative’ vision on tactile perception. Our novel finding is that hand posture affects tactile acuity.

Visually recognising one’s own body is important both for controlling movement and for one’s sense of self. Twenty previous studies asked healthy adults to make rapid recognition judgements about photographs of their own and other peoples’ hands. Some of these judgements involved explicit self-recognition: “Is this your hand or another person’s?” while others assessed self-recognition implicitly, comparing performance for self and other hands in tasks unrelated to self-other discrimination (e.g., left-versus-right; match-to-sample). We report five experiments with three groups of participants performing left-versus-right (Experiment 1) and self-versus-other discrimination tasks (Experiments 2 to 5). No evidence was found for better performance with self than with other stimuli, but some evidence was found for a self-disadvantage in the explicit task. Manipulating stimulus duration as a proxy for task difficulty revealed strong response biases in the explicit self-recognition task. Rather than discriminating between self and other stimuli, participants seem to treat self-other discrimination tasks as self-detection tasks, raising their criterion and consistently responding ‘not me’ when the task is difficult. A meta-analysis of 21 studies revealed no overall self-advantage, and suggested a publication bias for reports showing self-advantages in implicit tasks. Although this may appear counter-intuitive, we suggest that there may be no self-advantage in hand recognition.

The systems of science must reward honesty about mistakes to speed progress. The systems of science must reward honesty about mistakes to speed progress.

The brain represents the space immediately surrounding the body differently to more distant parts of space. Direct evidence for this ‘peripersonal space’ representation comes from neurophysiological studies in monkeys, which show distance-dependent responses to visual stimuli in neurons with spatially coincident tactile responses. Most evidence for peripersonal space in humans is indirect: spatial- and distance-dependent modulations of reaction times and error rates in behavioural tasks. In one task often used to assess peripersonal space, sounds near the body have been argued to speed reactions to tactile stimuli. We conducted four experiments attempting to measure this distance-dependent audiotactile interaction. We found no distance-dependent enhancement of tactile processing in error rates or task performance, but found some evidence for a general speeding of reaction times by 9.5 ms when sounds were presented near the hand. A systematic review revealed an overestimation of reported effect sizes, lack of control conditions, a wide variety of methods, post hoc removal of data, and flexible methods of data analysis. After correcting for the speed of sound, removing biased or inconclusive studies, correcting for temporal expectancy, and using the trim-and-fill method to correct for publication bias, meta-analysis revealed an overall benefit of 15.2 ms when tactile stimuli are accompanied by near sounds compared to sounds further away. While this effect may be due to peripersonal space, response probability and the number of trials per condition explained significant proportions of variance in this near versus far benefit. These confounds need to be addressed, and alternative explanations ruled out by future, ideally pre-registered, studies.

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 18 October 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01989

Objective. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on motor control have been suggested as tools for stroke rehabilitation. Some initial successes have been achieved with this approach, however the mechanism by which they work is not yet fully understood. One possible part of this mechanism is a, previously suggested, relationship between the strength of the event-related desynchronization (ERD), a neural correlate of motor imagination and execution, and corticospinal excitability. Additionally, a key component of BCIs used in neurorehabilitation is the provision of visual feedback to positively reinforce attempts at motor control. However, the ability of visual feedback of the ERD to modulate the activity in the motor system has not been fully explored. Approach. We investigate these relationships via transcranial magnetic stimulation delivered at different moments in the ongoing ERD related to hand contraction and relaxation during BCI control of a visual feedback bar. Main results. We identify a significant relationship between ERD strength and corticospinal excitability, and find that our visual feedback does not affect corticospinal excitability. Significance. Our results imply that efforts to promote functional recovery in stroke by targeting increases in corticospinal excitability may be aided by accounting for the time course of the ERD.

Initially designed to identify children's movement impairments in clinical settings, the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) is also widely used to evaluate children's movement in research. Standardised scores on the test are calculated using parametric methods under the assumption of normally-distributed data. In a pilot study with thirty five 8-10 year old children (i.e., in Age Band 2 of the MABC-2), we found that maximal performance was often reached. These 'ceiling effects' created distributions of scores that may violate parametric assumptions. Tests of normality, skew, and goodness-of-fit revealed this violation, most clearly on three of the eight sub-tests. A strong deviation from normality was again observed in a sample of 161 children (8-10 years, Experiment 1), however ceiling effects were reduced by modifying the scoring methods, and administering items designed for older children when maximal performance was reached. Experiment 2 (n = 81, 7-10 years) further refined the administration and scoring methods, and again improved the distributions of scores. Despite reducing ceiling effects, scores remained non-parametrically distributed, justifying non-parametric analytic approaches. By randomly and repeatedly resampling from the raw data, we generated non-parametric reference distributions for assigning percentiles to each child's performance, and compared the results with the standardised scores. Distributions of scores obtained with both parametric and non-parametric methods were skewed, and the methods resulted in different rankings of the same data. Overall, we demonstrate that some MABC-2 item scores are not normally-distributed, and violate parametric assumptions. Changes in administering and scoring may partially address these issues. We propose that resampling or other non-parametric methods are required to create new reference distributions to which an individual child's performance can be referred. The modifications we propose are preliminary, but the implication is that a new standardisation is required to deal with the non-parametric data acquired with the MABC-2 performance test.