What's in a Name? Conundrums Common to the Task‐Specific Disorders

Sadnicka, Anna; Kornysheva, Katja

doi:10.1002/mdc3.12684

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“… 41 Intact motor control of fingers in alterative tasks suggests that task-specific representations and mechanisms should be sought. 2 , 42 Higher-order regions of the sensorimotor are likely to be involved. For example, intensive training of sequences of finger presses is associated with the stabilization of sequence-specific activation patterns in premotor and parietal areas (whereas individual finger movements appear to be preferentially represented in M1 and S1; Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intact finger representation within primary sensorimotor cortex of musician’s dystonia

Sadnicka

Wiestler

Butler

et al. 2022

Brain

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Musician’s dystonia presents with a persistent deterioration of motor control during musical performance. A predominant hypothesis has been that this is underpinned by maladaptive neural changes to the somatotopic organisation of finger representations within primary somatosensory cortex. Here, we tested this hypothesis by investigating the finger-specific activity patterns in the primary somatosensory and motor cortex using functional MRI and multivariate pattern analysis in nine musicians with dystonia and nine healthy musicians. A purpose-built keyboard device allowed characterisation of activity patterns elicited during passive extension and active finger presses of individual fingers. We analysed the data using both traditional spatial analysis and state-of-the art multivariate analyses. Our analysis reveals that digit representations in musicians were poorly captured by spatial analyses. An optimised spatial metric found clear somatotopy but no difference in the spatial geometry between fingers with dystonia. Representational similarity analysis was confirmed as a more reliable technique than all spatial metrics evaluated. Significantly, the dissimilarity architecture was equivalent for musicians with and without dystonia. No expansion or spatial shift of digit representation maps were found in the symptomatic group. Our results therefore suggest that the neural representation of generic finger maps in primary sensorimotor cortex is intact in musician’s dystonia. These results speak against the idea that task-specific dystonia is associated with a distorted hand somatotopy and lend weight to an alternative hypothesis that task-specific dystonia is due to a higher order disruption of skill encoding. Such a formulation can better explain the task-specific deficit and offers alternative inroads for therapeutic interventions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intact finger representation within primary sensorimotor cortex of musician’s dystonia

Sadnicka

Wiestler

Butler

et al. 2022

Brain

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, it would be interesting to know if a forcible change in handwriting or if writing with a different body part such as the foot would alter the dysgraphia. 4 The underlying abnormality is considered to be the effector specific motor program that encodes the muscle activation pattern for each grapheme. This is perhaps a valid reason for a single letter but is uncertain if the same can hold true for abnormality in a specific pattern which is present across multiple graphemes.…”

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confidence: 99%