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Project

Impact of Parkinsons disease profile on motor learning: neuroscientific and behavioural insights.

Patients with Parkinsons disease (PD) suffer from severe cognitive and motor complications. Rehabilitation aimed to improve patients motor problems can positively affect their independence and quality of life. In this project we will investigate the impact of motor learning in combination with external cueing in two phenotypes of PD, i.e. patients with and without freezing of gait. These subgroups were recently shown to have distinct motor and cognitive disease profiles, irrespective of disease severity. We expect that patients with freezing have severe impairments in motor learning and depend highly on the presence of additional external information (cueing) to perform and learn motor tasks. First, we will investigate the behavioural and neural correlates of handwriting, a motor task which is often impaired in PD, during conditions with and without external cueing in both subgroups in comparison to healthy controls. Next, we will study whether freezers and non-freezers can improve their handwriting by means of 6 weeks of intensive training supported by cueing. To examine the mechanisms of cue-dependency during learning, we will compare the learning-related changes in brain activation between freezers, non-freezers and controls using fMRI and resting state fMRI. As such, this project will for the first time elucidate the potential for brain plasticity in PD patients with different disease phenotypes and will contribute to the development of novel rehabilitation strategies.
Date:1 Oct 2012 →  16 Sep 2018
Keywords:Parkinsons disease, Rehabilitation, Motor learning, External cueing, Handwriting
Disciplines:Neurosciences, Biological and physiological psychology, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, Developmental psychology and ageing, Other biological sciences, Orthopaedics, Human movement and sports sciences, Rehabilitation sciences