title: Intact mirror-tracing and impaired rotary-pursuit skill learning in patients with Huntington's disease: evidence for dissociable memory systems in skill learning.
abstract: Skill learning in early-stage Huntington's disease (HD) patients was compared with that of normal controls on 2 perceptual-motor tasks, rotary pursuit and mirror tracing. HD patients demonstrated a dissociation between impaired rotary-pursuit and intact mirror-tracing skill learning. These results suggest that different forms of perceptual-motor skill learning are mediated by separable neural circuits. A striatal memory system may be essential for sequence or open-loop skill learning but not for skills that involve the closed-loop learning of novel visual-response mappings. It is hypothesized that working memory deficits in HD resulting from frontostriatal damage may account broadly for intact and impaired long-term learning and memory in HD patients.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois, USA. gabrieli@psych.stanford.edu
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Gabrieli
authors.forename: G T
authors.initials: GT
authors.lastname: Stebbins
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.forename: D B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Willingham
authors.forename: C G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Goetz
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D004213:Dissociative Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006816:Huntington Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis