Event:

Apraxia caused by left-hemispheric stroke typically impairs purposeful skilled (sequential) movements. As apraxic patients have to reacquire these skills after stroke, motor learning is very important in the context of rehabilitation of these patients. In my talk, I am going to present the results of a study in which we investigated incidental sequence-specific motor learning in apraxic and non-apraxic stroke patients as well as in age- matched healthy controls.Motor learning was assessed using a visuo- manual serial reaction timetask. Subsequently, a free recall task was applied requiring subjects to intentionally retrieve as many sequence- elements as possible in the correct order. Despite generally prolonged reaction times, apraxic patients showed similar effects for sequence- specific motor learning as non-apraxic patients and healthy controls. In contrast, apraxic patients showed reduced intentional retrieval of the learnt sequence. In addition to the behavioural data I am going to show the neural substrates for the deficits observed in apraxicpatients which were revealed by statistical lesion symptom mapping.