The role of cerebellar structures in the execution of serial movements.

Thirteen patients with bilateral cerebellar disease and 12 patients with unilateral cerebellar disease were instructed to execute movement sequences in response to a simple reaction signal. Each to-be-executed sequence consisted either of a single, two, or three keypress components. Evidence for cerebellar involvement in the execution of programmed responses was sought in the pattern of response onset times and interkeypress times. Patients with mild bilateral cerebellar dysfunction or mild unilateral dysfunction, and neurologically unimpaired subjects showed increases in response onset time as sequence length increased from L = 1 to L = 3. In contrast to this, there were negligible or no effects of sequence length on response onset time in patients with moderate bilateral cerebellar dysfunction and in patients with moderate unilateral cerebellar dysfunction who responded with the hand ipsilateral to the lesion. Furthermore, cerebellar dysfunction was associated with significantly slower interkeypress reaction times. These results support the hypothesis that the translation of a programmed sequence of responses into action involves cerebellar structures which schedule a sequence of ordered responses before onset of movement.

[1]  G. Holmes.  THE SYMPTOMS OF ACUTE CEREBELLAR INJURIES DUE TO GUNSHOT INJURIES , 1917 .

[2]  G. Holmes.  THE CEREBELLUM OF MAN , 1939 .

[3]  Steven W. Keele,et al.  Movement control in skilled motor performance. , 1968 .

[4]  A. Kristofferson,et al.  Response delays and the timing of discrete motor responses , 1973 .

[5]  Stephen Monsell,et al.  The Latency and Duration of Rapid Movement Sequences: Comparisons of Speech and Typewriting , 1978 .

[6]  C. Marsden.  The mysterious motor function of the basal ganglia , 1982, Neurology.

[7]  Y. Lamarre,et al.  A Comparison of Neuronal Discharge Recorded in the Sensori-Motor Cortex, Parietal Cortex and Dentate Nucleus of the Monkey During Arm Movements Triggered by Light, Sound or Somesthetic Stimuli , 1983 .

[8]  V. Brooks.  The Cerebellum and Adaptive Tuning of Movements , 1984 .

[9]  V. Brooks.  Cerebellar functions in motor control. , 1984, Human neurobiology.

[10]  A. Gordon,et al.  Choosing between movement sequences: A hierarchical editor model. , 1984 .

[11]  H. Diener,et al.  Clinical Evidence for Functional Compartmentalization of the Cerebellum , 1984 .

[12]  T. Vilis,et al.  A Cerebellar-dependent Efference Copy Mechanism for Generating Appropriate Muscle Responses to Limb Perturbations , 1984 .

[13]  David A. Rosenbaum,et al.  Motor Programming: A Review and Scheduling Theory , 1985 .

[14]  A W Inhoff,et al.  Programming and execution of sequential movements in Parkinson's disease. , 1987, Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry.