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The Functional Role of the Cerebellum in Visually Guided Tracking Movement

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Abstract

We propose a new method to provide a functional interpretation of motor commands (i.e., muscle activities) and their relationship to movement kinematics. We evaluated our method by analyzing the motor commands of normal controls and patients with cerebellar disorders for visually guided tracking movement of the wrist joint. Six control subjects and six patients with cerebellar disorders participated in this study. We asked the subjects to perform visually guided smooth tracking movement of the wrist joint with a manipulandum, and recorded the movements of the wrist joint and activities of the four wrist prime movers with surface electrodes. We found a symmetric relationship between the second-order linear equation of motion for the wrist joint and the linear sum of activities of the four wrist prime movers. The symmetric relationship determined a set of parameters to characterize the muscle activities and their similarity to the components of movement kinematics of the wrist joint. We found that muscle activities of the normal controls encoded both the velocity and the position of the moving target, resulting in precise tracking of the target. In contrast, muscle activities of the cerebellar patients were characterized by a severer impairment for velocity control and more dependence on position control, resulting in poor tracking of the smoothly moving target with many step-like awkward movements. Our results suggest that the cerebellum plays an important role in the generation of motor commands for smooth velocity and position control.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Drs. Donna S. Hoffman, Steven Charles, Yasuharu Koike, Yutaka Sakaguchi, Eiichi Naito, Kazuo Tsuchiya, Koji Ito, Hiroaki Gomi, Yoshihisa Masakado, Junichi Ushiba, Yoshiaki Tsunoda, Yoshikatsu Hayashi, and Hiroshi Mitoma for their invaluable comments and discussions.

Funding

This research was supported by the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science and grants in aid from the Japan Science and Technology Agency and from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (No.14580784, No.15016008, No.16015212, No.20033029, No.21500319) to SK and (No.21700229) to JL.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Project for Motor Control, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, 2-1-6 Kamikitazawa, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 156-8506, Japan

    Jongho Lee, Saeka Tomatsu & Shinji Kakei

  2. Department of Neurology, Tokyo Metropolitan Neurological Hospital, Fuchū, Tokyo, Japan

    Yasuhiro Kagamihara

Authors
  1. Jongho Lee
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  2. Yasuhiro Kagamihara
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  3. Saeka Tomatsu
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  4. Shinji Kakei
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Correspondence to Shinji Kakei.

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Lee, J., Kagamihara, Y., Tomatsu, S. et al. The Functional Role of the Cerebellum in Visually Guided Tracking Movement. Cerebellum 11, 426–433 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-012-0370-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-012-0370-x

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