Impaired predictive motor timing in patients with cerebellar disorders

Abstract

The ability to precisely time events is essential for both perception and action. There is evidence that the cerebellum is important for the neural representation of time in a variety of behaviors including time perception, the tapping of specific time intervals, and eye-blink conditioning. It has been difficult to assess the contribution of the cerebellum to timing during more dynamic motor behavior because the component movements themselves may be abnormal or any motor deficit may be due to an inability to combine the component movements into a complete action rather than timing per se. Here we investigated the performance of subjects with cerebellar disease in predictive motor timing using a task that involved mediated interception of a moving target, and we tested the effect of movement type (acceleration, deceleration, constant), speed (slow, medium, fast), and angle (0 degrees , 15 degrees and 30 degrees) on performance. The subjects with cerebellar damage were significantly worse at interception than healthy controls even when we controlled for basic motor impairments such as response time. Our data suggest that subjects with damage to the cerebellum have a fundamental problem with predictive motor timing and indicate that the cerebellum plays an essential role in integrating incoming visual information with motor output when making predictions about upcoming actions. The findings demonstrate that the cerebellum may have properties that would facilitate the processing or storage of internal models of motor behavior.

Cerebellum and Timing

“…Experimental tasks designed to capture this problem show that individuals with cerebellar lesions have difficulty formulating temporal predictions required to execute accurate responses (Bares et al 2007(Bares et al , 2010a. Perceptual deficits have also been observed on tasks that do not directly assess duration.…”

“…Lateral cerebellum (lobule VI) is activated when healthy participants produce a simple button press to launch a "missile" to intercept a moving target (Bares et al 2007(Bares et al , 2010b (Fig. 52.2c).…”

Dissecting the Links Between Cerebellum and Dystonia

“…Within traditional motor adaptation paradigms, adaptive learning is assessed by the degree of the after-effect observed during a de-adaptation task and the amount of savings upon a second exposure to the adaptation task (i.e., a readaptation task). In context of the present study, locomotor adaptation is a process during which changes in locomotor output are stabilized over time by the central nervous system's incorporation of feed-forward predictive motor actions and sensorimotor feedback [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. While locomotor adaptation has previously been induced within the laboratory setting using a variety of different methods, Hoffland et al utilize a locomotor adaptation paradigm using a split-belt treadmill.…”

Respiratory, postural and spatio-kinetic motor stabilization, internal models, top-down timed motor coordination and expanded cerebello-cerebral circuitry: a review

“…Cerebellar circuits are involved both in creating internal models (Doya, 1999;Imamizu et al, 2000), and in timing (Bares et al, 2007;Salman, 2002). Such circuits are cytoarchitectonically uniform irrespective of the information provided by the different areas with which they form input/output information processing loops (Bloedel, 1992).…”