l-Dopa induces under-damped visually guided motor responses in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease preferentially affects internally generated movements, e.g., movements recalled from memory, while externally cued movements are relatively preserved. However, l-dopa may have effects on visually guided movements as well as error-related processing. Fourteen Parkinson’s disease (PD) subjects (on and off l-dopa medication) as well as ten normal controls performed a tracking task using a joystick. During discrete 30 s blocks, the visual feedback of the actual tracking errors were attenuated, amplified or unaltered. Second order dynamical system models, with the desired trajectory as the input and the actual motor performance as the output, were used to characterize the motor performance by the each subject under each condition. Although the overall root-mean-square tracking error did not significantly differ between groups, the nature of the motor performance differed significantly across groups. A clear dissociation was made between manipulations of error feedback—which altered the natural frequency of the models—and the effects of l-dopa, which affected damping. Compared to normal controls, PD subjects were significantly overdamped before medication and underdamped after medication. We interpret our results as being suggestive of l-dopa normalization of compensatory overactive cerebellar activity in PD.