RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Impaired Motor Recycling during Action Selection in Parkinson’s Disease JF eneuro JO eNeuro FD Society for Neuroscience SP ENEURO.0492-19.2020 DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0492-19.2020 VO 7 IS 2 A1 Matthias Fritsche A1 Robrecht P. R. D. van der Wel A1 Robin Smit A1 Bastiaan R. Bloem A1 Ivan Toni A1 Rick C. Helmich YR 2020 UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/7/2/ENEURO.0492-19.2020.abstract AB Behavioral studies have shown that the human motor system recycles motor parameters of previous actions, such as movement amplitude, when programming new actions. Shifting motor plans toward a new action forms a particularly severe problem for patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), a disorder that, in its early stage, is dominated by basal ganglia dysfunction. Here, we test whether this action selection deficit in Parkinson’s patients arises from an impaired ability to recycle motor parameters shared across subsequent actions. Parkinson’s patients off dopaminergic medication (n = 16) and matched healthy controls (n = 16) performed a task that involved moving a handheld dowel over an obstacle in the context of a sequence of aiming movements. Consistent with previous research, healthy participants continued making unnecessarily large hand movements after clearing the obstacle (defined as “hand path priming effect”), even after switching movements between hands. In contrast, Parkinson’s patients showed a reduced hand path priming effect, i.e., they performed biomechanically more efficient movements than controls, but only when switching movements between hands. This effect correlated with disease severity, such that patients with more severe motor symptoms had a smaller hand path priming effect. We propose that the basal ganglia mediate recycling of movement parameters across subsequent actions.