ASNR & TCMC Session

ASNR/TCMC Session:
Applied patient-based motor session
Organized by S. Thomas Carmichael, MD, PhD
& John Krakauer, MD

Friday morning heralds an exciting joint session of the American Society for Neurorehabiitation with the Translational and Computational Motor Control meeting. This session covers clinically related concepts in motor control biology, imaging, circuits, performance and outcomes. Talks from leaders in the field will alternate with those of fellows and graduate students.

Featured Speakers:
Bence Olveczky, PhD
Laurel Buxbaum, PsyD 

What parietal apraxia reveals about the brain's two action systems

Patients with limb apraxia due to left inferior parietal lesions show a number of fascinating patterns of performance.  Although they perform normally in reaching to and grasping currently visualized objects with their unimpaired left hands, their ability to predict how they would most comfortably position that hand for grasping is markedly impaired.  In addition, their ability to pantomime tool use movements and to imitate the actions of others is strikingly abnormal, and they are additionally disrupted by the removal of visual feedback.  They also show an abnormal reliance on the three dimensional structure of objects in performing action judgment tasks.  These and other data from our lab indicate that a ventro-dorsal stream in the left parietal lobe plays a critical role in the effector-independent simulation of complex movements, as distinguished from a bilateral dorso-dorsal system specialized for current visual control of action.