Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

From Perception To Execution In Parkinson’S Disease, Andrew Johnson, Quincy Almeida

Andrew M. Johnson

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects one’s ability to control voluntary movements. Typically, PD is considered a disease of motor output, without considering neuropsychological variables that might contribute to the impairment of movement. The goal of this chapter is to investigate issues of motor control, in addition to the observable motor symptoms found in PD from a perceptual and cognitive perspective. To this end, we divide movement into three components: perception, initiation, and execution. Perception is required initially, and throughout movement, and is generally used to define characteristics of a movement goal. Thus, in the earliest …