LAGRAVINESE G.

Background: The ability to predict temporal outcome of body movement is abnormal in idiopathic dystonia and can be altered by cerebellar neuromodulation. Tremor in cervical dystonia might be associated with performance on motion perception tasks. Methods: A total of 15 cervical dystonia patients with and 14 without tremor and 15 age-matched...

Objective: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) delivered over the cerebellum 5–7 ms prior to a stimulus over the contralateral primary motor cortex (M1) reduces the excitability of M1 output, a phenomenon termed cerebellar brain inhibition (CBI). The cerebellum receives sensory information for adaptive motor coordination and motor planning....

Before movement onset, during the reaction time, excitability of M1 is selectively modulated by somatosensory inputs, only in the movement-related muscle. If a similar mechanism operates before the onset of mental movements, then somatosensory afferent inputs are exploited during cognitive representation of movement. We assessed sensorimotor...

Complex motor tasks are learned through training which results in lasting improvement in sensorimotor performance and accuracy. Learning a motor skill is commonly attained via physical execution. However, research has shown that cognitive training, such as motor imagery (MI), effectively facilitates skill learning. Neurophysiological findings...

The investigation of how humans perceive and respond to emotional signals conveyed by the human body has been for a long time secondary compared with the investigation of facial expressions and emotional scenes recognition. The aims of this behavioral study were to assess the ability to process emotional body postures and to test whether motor...

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Theory of mind (ToM) refers to an individual's ability to attribute mental states to predict and explain another person's behavior. It has been shown that patients with cervical dystonia (CD) present impaired ToM ability supporting the idea that CD is a network disorder. An emerging hypothesis is that different phenotypes of CD reflect distinct...

Music is an important tool for the induction and regulation of emotion. Although learning a sequential motor behaviour is essential to normal motor function, to our knowledge, the role of music-induced emotion on motor learning has not been explored. Our experiment aimed to determine whether listening to different emotional music could...

Introduction: Emotional states have been shown to influence cognitive processes including visual-spatial learning. Parkinson's Disease (PD), besides manifesting with the cardinal motor symptoms, presents cognitive and affective disturbances. Here we aimed at investigating whether manipulation of the emotional state by means of music was able to...

Treadmill training with virtual reality (TT + VR) has been shown to improve gait performance and to reduce fall risk in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, there is no consensus on the optimal training duration. This study is a sub-study of the V-TIME randomized clinical trial (NCT01732653). In this study, we explored the effect of the duration...