Preserved motor memory in Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Patients with Parkinson’s disease, who lose the dopaminergic projections to the striatum, are impaired in certain aspects of motor learning. Recent evidence suggests that, in addition to its role in motor performance, the striatum plays a key role in the memory of motor learning. Whether Parkinson’s patients have impaired motor memory and whether motor memory is modulated by dopamine at the time of initial learning is unknown. To address these questions, we measured memory of a learned motor sequence in Parkinson’s patients who were either On or Off their dopaminergic medications. We compared them to a group of older and younger controls. Contrary to our predictions, motor memory was not impaired in patients compared to older controls, and was not influenced by dopamine state at the time of initial learning. To probe post-learning consolidation processes, we also tested whether learning a new sequence shortly after learning the initial sequence would interfere with later memory. We found that, in contrast to younger adults, neither older adults nor patients were susceptible to this interference. These findings suggest that motor memory is preserved in Parkinson’s patients and raise the possibility that motor memory in patients is supported by compensatory non-dopamine sensitive mechanisms. Furthermore, given the similar performance characteristics observed in the patients and older adults and the absence of an effect of dopamine, these results raise the possibility that aging and Parkinson’s disease affect motor memory in similar ways.