Stroke survivors show task-dependent modulation of motor variability during bimanual coordination

Abstract

Stroke often results in hemiparesis, leaving one side of the body affected relative to the other side. Prior research has shown that the affected arm has higher variability - however, the extent to which this variability can be modulated is unclear. Here we used a shared bimanual task to examine the degree to which participants could modulate the variability in the affected arm after stroke. Participants with chronic stroke (n = 11), and age-matched controls (n = 11) performed unimanual and bimanual reaching movements to move a cursor on a screen to different targets. In the unimanual condition, the cursor was controlled only by the movement of a single arm whereas in the bimanual condition, the cursor position was \"shared\" between the two arms by using a weighted average of the two hand positions. Unknown to the participants, we altered the weightings of the affected and unaffected arms to cursor motion and examined how the movement variability on each arm changed depending on its contribution to the task. Results showed that stroke survivors had higher movement variability on the affected arm - however, like age-matched controls, they were able to modulate the variability in both the affected and unaffected arms according to the weighting condition. Specifically, as the weighting on a particular arm increased (i.e. it became more important to the task), the movement variability decreased. These results show that stroke survivors are capable of modulating variability depending on the task context, and this feature may potentially be exploited for rehabilitation paradigms