Collaborative Antwerp Psychiatric Research Institute, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Exp Brain Res. 2024 Apr;242(4):879-899. doi: 10.1007/s00221-024-06797-9. Epub 2024 Mar 9.
Psychomotor slowing has consistently been observed in schizophrenia, however research on motor learning in schizophrenia is limited. Additionally, motor learning in schizophrenia has never been compared with the waning of motor learning abilities in the elderly. Therefore, in an extensive study, 30 individuals with schizophrenia, 30 healthy age-matched controls and 30 elderly participants were compared on sensorimotor learning tasks including sequence learning and adaptation (both explicit and implicit), as well as tracking and aiming. This paper presents new findings on an explicit motor sequence learning task, an explicit verbal learning task and a simple aiming task and summarizes all previously published findings of this large investigation. Individuals with schizophrenia and elderly had slower Movement Time (MT)s compared with controls in all tasks, however both groups improved over time. Elderly participants learned slower on tracking and explicit sequence learning while individuals with schizophrenia adapted slower and to a lesser extent to movement perturbations in adaptation tasks and performed less well on cognitive tests including the verbal learning task. Results suggest that motor slowing is present in schizophrenia and the elderly, however both groups show significant but different motor skill learning. Cognitive deficits seem to interfere with motor learning and performance in schizophrenia while task complexity and decreased movement precision interferes with motor learning in the elderly, reflecting different underlying patterns of decline in these conditions. In addition, evidence for motor slowing together with impaired implicit adaptation supports the influence of cerebellum and the cerebello-thalamo-cortical-cerebellar (CTCC) circuits in schizophrenia, important for further understanding the pathophysiology of the disorder.
精神运动迟缓在精神分裂症中一直存在，然而，精神分裂症患者的运动学习研究有限。此外，精神分裂症患者的运动学习从未与老年人运动学习能力的下降进行过比较。因此，在一项广泛的研究中，30 名精神分裂症患者、30 名年龄匹配的健康对照者和 30 名老年参与者在包括序列学习和适应（显性和隐性）、跟踪和瞄准在内的感觉运动学习任务上进行了比较。本文介绍了一项显性运动序列学习任务、一项显性言语学习任务和一项简单瞄准任务的新发现，并总结了这项大型研究的所有先前发表的结果。与对照组相比，所有任务中的精神分裂症患者和老年人的运动时间（MT）都较慢，但两组随时间推移都有所改善。老年人在跟踪和显性序列学习方面的学习速度较慢，而精神分裂症患者在适应任务中适应速度较慢，适应程度较低，在认知测试（包括言语学习任务）中的表现较差。结果表明，运动迟缓存在于精神分裂症和老年人中，但两组都表现出显著但不同的运动技能学习。认知缺陷似乎干扰了精神分裂症患者的运动学习和表现，而任务复杂性和运动精度下降则干扰了老年人的运动学习，反映了这些情况下不同的潜在衰退模式。此外，运动迟缓的证据加上隐性适应能力受损，支持小脑和小脑-丘脑-皮质-小脑（CTCC）回路在精神分裂症中的影响，这对进一步了解该疾病的病理生理学很重要。
