Publications by authors named "C Moisello"
Article Synopsis
- The study found that healthy individuals show increased beta power during movement practice, while patients with Parkinson's disease do not, indicating a limit in their brain's plasticity.
- Improvements in reaching task performance occurred in both groups, but there was no link between EEG changes and motor skill retention for PD patients.
- Beta modulation did increase within each movement block in both groups, but controls showed a retention of performance improvement, suggesting PD patients struggle with memory formation mechanisms necessary for skill enhancement.
The neural correlates of memory formation in humans have long been investigated by exposing subjects to diverse material and comparing responses to items later remembered to those forgotten. Tasks requiring memorization of sensory sequences afford unique possibilities for linking neural memorization processes to behavior, because, rather than comparing across different items of varying content, each individual item can be examined across the successive learning states of being initially unknown, newly learned, and eventually, fully known. Sequence learning paradigms have not yet been exploited in this way, however.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: PD (Parkinson's disease) is characterized by impairments in cortical plasticity, in beta frequency at rest and in beta power modulation during movement (i.e., event-related ERS [synchronization] and ERD [desynchronization]).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn previous studies of young subjects performing a reaction-time reaching task, we found that faster reaction times are associated with increased suppression of beta power over primary sensorimotor areas just before target presentation. Here we ascertain whether such beta decrease similarly occurs in normally aging subjects and also in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), where deficits in movement execution and abnormalities of beta power are usually present. We found that in both groups, beta power decreased during the motor task in the electrodes over the two primary sensorimotor areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In Parkinson's disease (PD), skill retention is poor, even when acquisition rate is generally preserved. Recent work in normal subjects suggests that 5 Hz-repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (5Hz-rTMS) may induce phenomena of long-term potentiation at the cortical level.
Objective/hypothesis: We thus verified whether, in PD, 5Hz-rTMS enhances retention of a visuo-motor skill that involves the activity of the right posterior parietal cortex.