Different Connectivity Approaches to Examine Motor Memory Consolidation with Resting-State fMRI

SOLANO, AGUSTIN; GIMENEZ, IGNACIO; JACOBACCI, FLORENCIA; DELLA MAGGIORE, VALERIA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 2nd Federation of Latin-American and Caribbean Societies for Neuroscience (FALAN) Congress; 2016

Federation of Latin-American and Caribbean Societies for Neuroscience

In order to maintain motor control in the presence of environmental or internal perturbations, individuals learn to adjust their movements through a process called Sensorimotor Adaptation (SA). The time course of memory consolidation related to SA has been studied by behavioral approaches, being retrograde interference the most common. However, this protocol masks the effect of interest. An indirect way to address this issue is by measuring the time course of functional connectivity (FC) that relates to long-term memory. Here we used resting-state fMRI to explore memory consolidation after SA. Healthy subjects performed a visuomotor adaptation task where they learned to adjust their motor output to a visual rotation of 40°. A control group without perturbation was also included. Short-term and Long-term memory were measured immediately after the training session and 24hs later, respectively.Resting-state functional images were acquired before training and at 15min, 1, 3, 5.5 and 24 hs after training. FC across different time points was analyzed using Pearson correlation, followed by Partial Least Squares. Our results identified a network including the posterior parietal cortex, cerebellum and motor cortex that increased their connectivity as a function of time up to 5.5h and decreased thereafter. This pattern correlated with Long-term memory. We will compare these results to those found using a complex systems-based approach.