Authors: Martin Bareš Ovidiu V Lungu Ivica Husárová Tomáš Gescheidt
Publish Date: 2009/10/23
Volume: 9, Issue: 1, Pages: 124-135
Abstract
There is evidence that both the basal ganglia and the cerebellum play a role in the neural representation of time in a variety of behaviours but whether one of them is more important is not yet clear To address this question in the context of predictive motor timing we tested patients with various movement disorders implicating these two structures in a motortiming task Specifically we investigated four different groups 1 patients with early Parkinsons disease PD 2 patients with sporadic spinocerebellar ataxia SCA 3 patients with familial essential tremor ET and 4 matched healthy controls We used a predictive motortiming task that involved mediated interception of a moving target and we assessed the effect of movement type acceleration deceleration and constant speed slow medium and fast and angle 0° 15° and 30° on performance hit early error and late error The main results showed that PD group and arm ET subgroup did not significantly differ from the control group SCA and head ET subjects severe and mild cerebellar damage respectively were significantly worse at interception than the other two groups Our findings support the idea that the basal ganglia play a less significant role in predictive motor timing than the cerebellum The fact that SCA and ET subjects seemed to have a fundamental problem with predictive motor timing suggests that the cerebellum plays an essential role in integrating incoming visual information with the motor output in a timely manner and that ET is a heterogeneous entity that deserves increased attention from clinicians
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