Skill learning is a fundamental adaptive process, but the mechanisms remain poorly understood. Some learning paradigms, particularly in the memory domain, are closely associated with gamma activity that is amplitude-modulated by the phase of underlying theta activity, but whether such nested activity patterns also underpin skill learning is unknown. Here we addressed this question by using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over sensorimotor cortex to modulate theta-gamma activity during motor skill acquisition, as an exemplar of a non-hippocampal-dependent task. We demonstrated, and then replicated, a significant improvement in skill acquisition with theta-gamma tACS, which outlasted the stimulation by an hour. Our results suggest that theta-gamma activity may be a common mechanism for learning across the brain and provides a putative novel intervention for optimising functional improvements in response to training or therapy.

A systematic review of the literature on statistical and machine learning schemes for identifying symptoms of developmental stuttering from audio recordings is reported. Twenty-seven papers met the quality standards that were set. Comparison of results across studies was not possible because training and testing data, model architecture and feature inputs varied across studies. The limitations that were identified for comparison across studies included: no indication of application for the work, data were selected for training and testing models in ways that could lead to biases, studies used different datasets and attempted to locate different symptom types, feature inputs were reported in different ways and there was no standard way of reporting performance statistics. Recommendations were made about how these problems can be addressed in future work on this topic.

Skill learning is a fundamental adaptive process, but the mechanisms remain poorly understood.Hippocampal learning is closely associated with gamma activity, which is amplitude-modulated by the phase of underlying theta activity. Whether such nested activity patterns also underpin skill acquisition in non-hippocampal tasks is unknown. Here we addressed this question by using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over sensorimotor cortex to modulate thetagamma activity during motor skill acquisition, as an exemplar of a non-hippocampal-dependent task.We demonstrated, and then replicated, a significant improvement in skill acquisition with thetagamma tACS, which outlasted the stimulation by an hour. Our results suggest that theta-gamma activity may be a common mechanism for learning across the brain and provides a putative novel intervention for optimising functional improvements in response to training or therapy.

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