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暂无摘要。

Research has shown that physical activity has a range of benefits for people living with Parkinson\'s (PLwP), improving muscle strength, balance, flexibility, and walking, as well as non-motor symptoms such as mood. Parkinson\'s Beats is a form of cardio-drumming, specifically adapted for PLwP, and requires no previous experience nor skills. Nineteen PLwP (aged between 55 and 80) took part in the regular Parkinson\'s Beats sessions in-person or online. Focus group discussions took place after twelve weeks to understand the impacts of Parkinson\'s Beats. Through the framework analysis, six themes and fifteen subthemes were generated. Participants reported a range of benefits of cardio-drumming, including improved fitness and movement, positive mood, the flow experience, and enhanced social wellbeing. A few barriers to participation were also reported. Future research is justified, and best practice guidelines are needed to inform healthcare professionals, PLwP and their care givers.

Many studies infer the role of neurons by asking what information can be decoded from their activity or by observing the consequences of perturbing their activity. An alternative approach is to consider information flow between neurons. We applied this approach to the parietal reach region (PRR) and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) in posterior parietal cortex. Two complementary methods imply that across a range of reaching tasks, information flows primarily from PRR to LIP. This indicates that during a coordinated reach task, LIP has minimal influence on PRR and rules out the idea that LIP forms a general purpose spatial processing hub for action and cognition. Instead, we conclude that PRR and LIP operate in parallel to plan arm and eye movements, respectively, with asymmetric interactions that likely support eye-hand coordination. Similar methods can be applied to other areas to infer their functional relationships based on inferred information flow.

The differentiation between continuous and discrete actions is key for behavioral neuroscience. Although many studies have characterized eye-hand coordination during discrete (e.g., reaching) and continuous (e.g., pursuit tracking) actions, all these studies were conducted separately, using different setups and participants. In addition, how eye-hand coordination might operate at the frontier between discrete and continuous movements remains unexplored. Here we filled these gaps by means of a task that could elicit different movement dynamics. Twenty-eight participants were asked to simultaneously track with their eyes and a joystick a visual target that followed an unpredictable trajectory and whose position was updated at different rates (from 1.5 to 240 Hz). This procedure allowed us to examine actions ranging from discrete point-to-point movements (low refresh rate) to continuous pursuit (high refresh rate). For comparison, we also tested a manual tracking condition with the eyes fixed and a pure eye tracking condition (hand fixed). The results showed an abrupt transition between discrete and continuous hand movements around 3 Hz contrasting with a smooth trade-off between fixations and smooth pursuit. Nevertheless, hand and eye tracking accuracy remained strongly correlated, with each of these depending on whether the other effector was recruited. Moreover, gaze-cursor distance and lag were smaller when eye and hand performed the task conjointly than separately. Altogether, despite some dissimilarities in eye and hand dynamics when transitioning between discrete and continuous movements, our results emphasize that eye-hand coordination continues to smoothly operate and support the notion of synergies across eye movement types.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The differentiation between continuous and discrete actions is key for behavioral neuroscience. By using a visuomotor task in which we manipulate the target refresh rate to trigger different movement dynamics, we explored eye-hand coordination all the way from discrete to continuous actions. Despite abrupt changes in hand dynamics, eye-hand coordination continues to operate via a gradual trade-off between fixations and smooth pursuit, an observation confirming the notion of synergies across eye movement types.

Mirror drawing is a motor learning task that is used to evaluate and improve eye-hand coordination of users and can be implemented in immersive Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) for training purposes. In this paper, we investigated the effect of color cues on user motor performance in a mirror-drawing task between Virtual Environment (VE) and Real World (RW), with three different colors. We conducted a 5-day user study with twelve participants. The results showed that the participants made fewer errors in RW compared to VR, except for pre-training, which indicated that hardware and software limitations have detrimental effects on the motor learning of the participants across different realities. Furthermore, participants made fewer errors with the colors close to green, which is usually associated with serenity, contentment, and relaxation. According to our findings, VR headsets can be used to evaluate participants\' eye-hand coordination in mirror drawing tasks to evaluate the motor-learning of participants. VE and RW training applications could benefit from our findings in order to enhance their effectiveness.

BACKGROUND: The fine visuomotor function is commonly impaired in several neurological conditions. However, there is a scarcity of reliable neuropsychological tools to assess such a critical domain.
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to explore the psychometric properties and provide normative data for the Visual-Motor Speed and Precision Test (VMSPT).
RESULTS: Our normative sample included 220 participants (130 females) aged 18-86 years (mean education = 15.24 years, SD = 3.98). Results showed that raw VMSPT scores were affected by higher age and lower education. No effect of sex or handedness was shown. Age- and education-based norms were provided. VMSPT exhibited weak-to-strong correlations with well-known neuropsychological tests, encompassing a wide range of cognitive domains of clinical relevance. By gradually intensifying the cognitive demands, the test becomes an indirect, performance-oriented measure of executive functioning. Finally, VMSPT seems proficient in capturing the speed-accuracy trade-off typically observed in the aging population.
CONCLUSIONS: This study proposes the initial standardization of a versatile, time-efficient, and cost-effective neuropsychological tool for assessing fine visuomotor coordination. We propose renaming the VMSPT as the more approachable \"Little Circles Test\" (LCT).

Fast movements like saccadic eye movements that occur in the absence of sensory feedback are thought to be controlled by internal feedback. Such internal feedback provides an instantaneous estimate of the output, which serves as a proxy for sensory feedback, that can be used by the controller to correct deviations from the desired plan. In the predominant view, the desired plan/input is encoded in the form of a static displacement signal (endpoint model), believed to be encoded in the spatial map of the superior colliculus (SC). However, recent evidence has shown that SC neurons have a dynamic signal that correlates with saccade velocity, suggesting that information for velocity-based control is available for generating saccades. Motivated by this observation, we used a novel optimal control framework to test whether saccadic execution could be achieved by tracking a dynamic velocity signal at the input. We validated this velocity tracking model in a task where the peak saccade velocity was modulated by the speed of a concurrent hand movement independent of the saccade endpoint. A comparison showed that in this task, the velocity tracking model performed significantly better than the endpoint model. These results suggest that the saccadic system may have additional flexibility to incorporate a velocity-based internal feedback control when imposed by task goals or context.

Amblyopia is characterized by spatiotemporal uncertainty in the visual system. In addition to its effects on vision, amblyopia also exerts a widespread impact on other systems. Many of these changes are observed not only during amblyopic eye viewing but also during fellow eye and binocular viewing. They generally correlate with the severity of visual acuity and stereo acuity loss. The affected systems include: (1) oculomotor control manifested as abnormal fixation, saccades, smooth pursuit, and saccadic adaptation; (2) motor control with altered programming, execution, and temporal dynamics of eye-hand coordination, and decreased ability of the sensorimotor system to adapt to changes in the visual environment; (3) balance control with decreased postural stability; (4) multisensory integration characterized by reduced McGurk effect and altered cross-modal interactions in audiovisual perception; and (5) auditory localization manifested as impaired spatial hearing as a result of abnormal developmental calibration of the auditory map. To detect amblyopia early, a targeted approach is required to identify children from low-income families through in-school visual screening, supplemented by follow-up care and free eyeglasses in high-needs schools.

Although synchrony between the limbs is an often-cited feature of bimanual coordination, recent studies have also highlighted the small asynchronies that can occur. The visuo-motor demands of any bimanual task are considered central to the emergence of asynchrony, but the relationship between the two remains largely unexplored. This study aimed to address this issue. Hand and eye movements were measured in 19 participants, while they made either unimanual or bimanual reach-to-point (aiming) movements to targets presented on a touchscreen. Bimanual movements were either congruent (same-sized targets) or incongruent (different-sized targets). Resulting hand data showed many of the typical patterns of movement previously reported. While temporal coupling between the limbs remained largely evident for bimanual movements, small between-limb asynchronies were apparent and demonstrated clear associations with the competing precision requirements of the targets and related visual attention. Participants mainly directed their gaze towards the more difficult target with corresponding reaching movements demonstrating greater precision than for the easier target. Additionally, there was a reliable tendency for the hand reaching towards the more difficult target to lead. Importantly, it was the competing visuo-motor demands of individual movements rather than overall difficulty that resulted in greater between-limb asynchrony; accordingly, where both targets were small (i.e., the most difficult condition), asynchrony was significantly less pronounced than for incongruent bimanual conditions. The results show how the visuo-motor system balances its apparent drive for synchrony in coordinating bimanual movements with the competing demands that characterise the constituent unimanual movements.