Implicit Motor Sequence Learning in People with Mild to Moderate Parkinson’s Disease: Behavior and Related Brain Function

BACKGROUND: Deficits in motor learning could be an important explanation for the balance and gait impairments characteristic of people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Empirical studies often report that so-called implicit motor sequence learning is impaired in people with PD, but the results are inconclusive. Altered brain activity during implicit motor sequence learning has also been reported for people with PD in comparison to healthy individuals. OBJECTIVE: To investigate implicit motor sequence learning and associated neural correlates in individuals with mild to moderate PD. METHODS: Fifty-seven participants with PD and 34 healthy participants, all ≥60 years of age, performed the serial reaction time task (SRTT) during the acquisition of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. We analyzed the SRTT as a measure of implicit motor sequence learning in two complementary ways. We analyzed the task-induced fMRI data within regions of interest (ROIs) as well as functional connectivity between ROIs. RESULTS: We found a significant group difference in SRTT performance indicating that the participants with PD had a somewhat lower level of implicit motor sequence learning than the healthy participants. Exploratory analyses suggested that impairments in implicit motor sequence learning for people with PD might be due to a lower learning rate. We did not find any significant group differences in the fMRI data. CONCLUSION: Our exploratory finding of a lower implicit motor learning rate in PD could have important implications for how people with PD should practice new motor tasks and physical exercise. Future studies need to confirm this finding with hypothesis-driven analyses.