Cerebellar Contributions to Locomotor Adaptations during Splitbelt Treadmill Walking
By S. Morton, Amy J. Bastian. Journal of Neuroscience, 2006
613 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Locomotor adaptability ranges from the simple and fast-acting to the complex and long-lasting and is a requirement for successful mobility in an unpredictable environment. Several neural structures, including the spinal cord, brainstem, cerebellum, and motor cortex, have been implicated in the control of various types of locomotor adaptation. However, it is not known which structures control which types of adaptation and the specific mechanisms by which the appropriate adjustments are made. Here, we used a splitbelt treadmill to test cerebellar contributions to two different forms of locomotor adaptation in humans. We found that cerebellar damage does not impair the ability to make reactive feedback-driven motor adaptations, but significantly disrupts predictive feedforward motor adaptations during splitbelt treadmill locomotion. Our results speak to two important aspects of locomotor control. First, we have demonstrated that different levels of locomotor adaptability are clearly dissociable. Second, the cerebellum seems to play an essential role in predictive but not reactive locomotor adjustments. We postulate that reactive adjustments may instead be predominantly controlled by lower neural centers, such as the spinal cord or brainstem.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology, Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/498a720df4335fe32e67a8e894ffb9be018e1a14
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Citations in the corpus
- Use-Dependent and Error-Based Learning of Motor Behaviors (2010, background): “Motor behaviors such as reaching (Shadmehr and Mussa-Ivaldi, 1994; Donchin et al., 2003), eye movements (Srimal et al., 2008), walking (Morton and Bastian, 2006), and object manipulation (Witney et al., 2000) quickly adapt to the changing dynamics of the body and environment.”
- Cerebellum-like structures and their implications for cerebellar function. (2008, background): “Several studies indicate that predictive feedforward control is deficient in cerebellar patients (Morton & Bastian 2006, Smith & Shadmehr 2005).”