https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826079/
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
Abstract
The
basal ganglia are known to play a crucial role in movement execution,
but their importance for motor skill learning remains unclear. Obstacles
to our understanding include the lack of a universally accepted
definition of motor skill learning (definition confound), and
difficulties in distinguishing learning deficits from execution
impairments (performance confound). We studied how healthy subjects and
subjects with a basal ganglia disorder learn fast accurate reaching
movements. We addressed the definition and performance confounds by: (1)
focusing on an operationally defined core element of motor skill
learning (speed-accuracy learning), and (2) using normal variation in
initial performance to separate movement execution impairment from motor
learning abnormalities. We measured motor skill learning as performance
improvement in a reaching task with a speed-accuracy trade-off. We
compared the performance of subjects with Huntington's disease (HD), a
neurodegenerative basal ganglia disorder, to that of premanifest
carriers of the HD mutation and of control subjects. The initial
movements of HD subjects were less skilled (slower and/or less accurate)
than those of control subjects. To factor out these differences in
initial execution, we modeled the relationship between learning and
baseline performance in control subjects. Subjects with HD exhibited a
clear learning impairment that was not explained by differences in
initial performance. These results support a role for the basal ganglia
in both movement execution and motor skill learning.
More at link.
No comments:
Post a Comment