Abstract
Motor skill acquisition was investigated in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) or cerebellar dysfunction using two sensory-guided tracking tasks. The subjects had to learn to track a visual target (a square) on a computer screen by moving a joystick under two different conditions. In the unreversed task, the horizontal target movements were semi-predictable and could be anticipated. In the reversed task, the horizontal movements of a pointer which had to be kept within the target square were mirror-reversed to the joystick movements. PD patients showed intact learning of the semi-predictable task and reduced learning of the mirror-reversed task; patients with cerebellar dysfunction showed the opposite pattern. These findings are discussed in relation to the differential contribution of the cerebellum and the striatum to motor skill acquisition: the cerebellum appears to participate in the implementation of anticipatory movements, whereas the striatum may be critically involved in types of motor learning which require a high degree of internal elaboration.
Highlights
Skill acquisition refers to the ability to learn through practice
The time-on-target data for the Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients and their normal control subjects (NC) subjects are shown in Fig. 1, separately for the predictable horizontal and the unpredictable vertical directions
The learning curves are characterised by improvements within the first minute of practice; this is followed by small increases of the time-on-target scores within the two minutes
Summary
Motor skill learning is a typical example of non-declarative learning, i.e., behavioural changes as a result of experience that are not dependent upon explicit reference to previous training sessions or stored memory contents. Consistent with this view, patients with severe amnesia were unimpaired at acquiring motor skills in a range of tasks including mirror drawing or rotor pursuit (see [24]). Neuroimaging studies confirmed that learning and automatisation of different motor skills are accompanied by significant blood flow changes in both brain areas, but the pattern of results is far from consistent [6]. The findings of a particular study are dependent upon the specific features of the learning paradigm and the stage of acquisition at the time of scanning (for a discussion see [6])
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