Quantification of hand functional recovery in spinal cord injury patients.

Study Design: A prospective cohort study.

Objectives: To examine the use of a circle-tracing task in quantifying hand functional recovery in cervical spinal cord injury patients.

Methods: Ten cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) patients and 10 healthy age-matched controls performed a circle-tracing task, using a computerized tablet at the beginning of the study and after 4 weeks.

The Best of Two Different Visual Instructions in Improving Precision Ball-Throwing and Standing Long Jump Performances in Primary School Children.

Two observational learning approaches have been shown to be successful in improving children's motor performances: one is "technique-focused", another is "goal-focused". In this study, we sought to compare the effectiveness of these two strategies, thus testing for the more efficient method of observational learning to enhance motor skills in primary school children. To this end, two experiments were designed.

Crosstalk between Gross and Fine Motor Domains during Late Childhood: The Influence of Gross Motor Training on Fine Motor Performances in Primary School Children.

Gross and fine motor competence have a close relationship during development and are shown to correlate to some extent. However, the study of the interaction between these domains still requires further insights. In this study, we investigated the developmental changes in overall motor skills as well as the effects of gross motor training programs on fine motor skills in children (aged 6-11, = 240).

Examining modifications of execution strategies during a continuous task.

How strategies are formulated during a performance is an important aspect of motor control. Knowledge of the strategy employed in a task may help subjects achieve better performances, as it would help to evidence other possible strategies that could be used as well as help perfect a certain strategy. We sought to investigate how much of a performance is conditioned by the initial state and whether behavior throughout the performance is modified within a short timescale.

An Inertial Measurement Unit-Based Wireless System for Shoulder Motion Assessment in Patients with Cervical Spinal Cord Injury: A Validation Pilot Study in a Clinical Setting.

Residual motion of upper limbs in individuals who experienced cervical spinal cord injury (CSCI) is vital to achieve functional independence. Several interventions were developed to restore shoulder range of motion (ROM) in CSCI patients. However, shoulder ROM assessment in clinical practice is commonly limited to use of a simple goniometer.

Circle drawing and tracing dataset for evaluation of fine motor control.

We introduce a motion dataset from healthy human subjects ( = 125) performing two fine motor control tasks on a graphic tablet, namely circle drawing and circle tracing. The article reports the methods and materials used to capture the motion data. The method for data acquisition is the same as the one used to investigate some aspects of fine motor control in healthy subjects in the paper by Cohen et al.

Assessing the Development of Fine Motor Control in Elementary School Children Using Drawing and Tracing Tasks.

Adequately quantifying fine motor control is imperative for understanding individual motor behavior development and mastery. We recently showed that using different tasks to evaluate fine motor control may produce different results, suggesting that multiple measures for fine motor control may be evaluating different skills and/or underlying processes. Specifically, drawing behavior may depend on internal cueing, whereas tracing depends more on external cueing.

Future Portrait of the Athletic Brain: Mechanistic Understanding of Human Sport Performance Animal Neurophysiology of Motor Behavior.

Sport performances are often showcases of skilled motor control. Efforts to understand the neural processes subserving such movements may teach us about general principles of behavior, similarly to how studies on neurological patients have guided early work in cognitive neuroscience. While investigations on non-human animal models offer valuable information on the neural dynamics of skilled motor control that is still difficult to obtain from humans, sport sciences have paid relatively little attention to these mechanisms.

Visuomotor perturbation in a continuous circle tracing task: novel approach for quantifying motor adaptation.

The study of motor adaptation certainly has advanced greatly through the years and helped to shed light on the mechanisms of motor learning. Most paradigms used to study adaptation employ a discrete approach, where people adapt in successive attempts. Continuous tasks on the other hand, while known to possess different characteristics than discrete ones, have received little attention regarding the study motor adaptation.

The Less You Are, the More You Are Helped: Effect of Kinesio Tape on Temporal Coordination.

We investigated whether a relationship exists between the inherent timing skill of subject and the magnitude of effect of KT on timing performance by expanding the examination of the dataset described in our previous work. Healthy subjects, tested with and without KT (NKT), performed sets of repetitive wrist's flexion-extensions (IWFEs) with the dominant limb (DL) and the non-dominant limb (NDL) in a synchronization-continuation task at two inter-onset intervals (IOIs): 550-ms and 800-ms. Standard deviation (SD) of IWFEs was used to measure the unevenness of performance.

Precision in drawing and tracing tasks: Different measures for different aspects of fine motor control.

Drawing and tracing tasks, by being relatively easy to execute and evaluate, have been incorporated in many paradigms used to study motor control. While these tasks are helpful when examining various aspects relative to the performance, the relationship in proficiency between these tasks was not evaluated to our knowledge. Seeing that drawing is thought to be an internally cued and tracing an externally cued task, differences in performances are to be expected.

Deletion of the endogenous TrkB.T1 receptor isoform restores the number of hippocampal CA1 parvalbumin-positive neurons and rescues long-term potentiation in pre-symptomatic mSOD1(G93A) ALS mice.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) causes rapidly progressive paralysis and death within 5 years from diagnosis due to degeneration of the motor circuits. However, a significant population of ALS patients also shows cognitive impairments and progressive hippocampal pathology. Likewise, the mutant SOD1(G93A) mouse model of ALS (mSOD1), in addition to loss of spinal motor neurons, displays altered spatial behavior and hippocampal abnormalities including loss of parvalbumin-positive interneurons (PVi) and enhanced long-term potentiation (LTP).

The effect of fidget spinners on fine motor control.

Fidgeting, defined as the generation of small movements through nervousness or impatience, is one of cardinal characteristic of ADHD. While fidgeting is, by definition, a motor experience still nothing is known about the effects of fidgeting on motor control. Some forms of fidgeting involve also the manipulation of external objects which, through repetition, may become automatic and second nature.

3D reconstruction of human movement in a single projection by dynamic marker scaling.

The three dimensional (3D) reconstruction of movement from videos is widely utilized as a method for spatial analysis of movement. Several approaches exist for a 3D reconstruction of movement using 2D video projection, most of them require the use of at least two cameras as well as the application of relatively complex algorithms. While a few approaches also exist for 3D reconstruction of movement with a single camera, they are not widely implemented due to tedious and complicated methods of calibration.

When Non-Dominant Is Better than Dominant: Kinesiotape Modulates Asymmetries in Timed Performance during a Synchronization-Continuation Task.

There is a growing consensus regarding the specialization of the non-dominant limb (NDL)/hemisphere system to employ proprioceptive feedback when executing motor actions. In a wide variety of rhythmic tasks the dominant limb (DL) has advantages in speed and timing consistency over the NDL. Recently, we demonstrated that the application of Kinesio Tex (KT) tape, an elastic therapeutic device used for treating athletic injuries, improves significantly the timing consistency of isochronous wrist's flexion-extensions (IWFEs) of the DL.

Neural plasticity and network remodeling: From concepts to pathology.

Neuroplasticity has been subject to a great deal of research in the last century. Recently, significant emphasis has been placed on the global effect of localized plastic changes throughout the central nervous system, and on how these changes integrate in a pathological context. Specifically, alterations of network functionality have been described in various pathological contexts to which corresponding structural alterations have been proposed.

Acetylcholine, GABA and neuronal networks: a working hypothesis for compensations in the dystrophic brain.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a genetic disease arising from a mutation in the dystrophin gene, is characterized by muscle failure and is often associated with cognitive deficits. Studies of the dystrophic brain on the murine mdx model of DMD provide evidence of morphological and functional alterations in the central nervous system (CNS) possibly compatible with the cognitive impairment seen in DMD. However, while some of the alterations reported are a direct consequence of the absence of dystrophin, others seem to be associated only indirectly.

A little elastic for a better performance: kinesiotaping of the motor effector modulates neural mechanisms for rhythmic movements.

A rhythmic motor performance is brought about by an integration of timing information with movements. Investigations on the millisecond time scale distinguish two forms of time control, event-based timing and emergent timing. While event-based timing asserts the existence of a central internal timekeeper for the control of repetitive movements, the emergent timing perspective claims that timing emerges from dynamic control of nontemporal movements parameters.

Modulation of isochronous movements in a flexible environment: links between motion and auditory experience.

The ability to perform isochronous movements while listening to a rhythmic auditory stimulus requires a flexible process that integrates timing information with movement. Here, we explored how non-temporal and temporal characteristics of an auditory stimulus (presence, interval occupancy, and tempo) affect motor performance. These characteristics were chosen on the basis of their ability to modulate the precision and accuracy of synchronized movements.