1. Dopaminergic Striatal Innervation Predicts Interlimb Transfer of a Visuomotor Skill
- Author
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Ioannis U. Isaias, Giovanni Pezzoli, Paolo Cavallari, Giorgio Marotta, Bernardo Perfetti, Margherita Canesi, Maria Felice Ghilardi, Clara Moisello, and M Schiavella
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Time Factors ,Dopamine ,Transfer, Psychology ,Dopamine Plasma Membrane Transport Proteins ,Brain mapping ,Article ,medicine ,Humans ,Motor skill ,Aged ,Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon ,Denervation ,Brain Mapping ,General Neuroscience ,Putamen ,Dopaminergic ,Extremities ,Parkinson Disease ,Middle Aged ,Adaptation, Physiological ,Corpus Striatum ,Left limb ,Motor Skills ,Female ,Psychology ,Neuroscience ,Photic Stimulation ,Tropanes ,medicine.drug - Abstract
We investigated whether dopamine influences the rate of adaptation to a visuomotor distortion and the transfer of this learning from the right to the left limb in human subjects. We thus studied patients with Parkinson disease as a putativein vivomodel of dopaminergic denervation. Despite normal adaptation rates, patients showed a reduced transfer compared with age-matched healthy controls. The magnitude of the transfer, but not of the adaptation rate, was positively predicted by the values of dopamine-transporter binding of the right caudate and putamen. We conclude that striatal dopaminergic activity plays an important role in the transfer of visuomotor skills.
- Published
- 2011
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