Intact Mirror-Tracing and Impaired Rotary-Pursuit Skill Learning in Patients With Huntington's Disease: Evidence for Dissociable Memory Systems in Skill Learning

Skill learning in early-stage Huntington's disease (HD) patients was compared with that of normal controls on 2 perceptual-motor tasks, rotary pursuit and mirror tracing. HD patients demonstrated a dissociation between impaired rotary-pursuit and intact mirror-tracing skill learning. These results suggest that different forms of perceptual-motor skill learning are mediated by separable neural circuits. A striatal memory system may be essential for sequence or open-loop skill learning but not for skills that involve the closed-loop learning of novel visual-response mappings. It is hypothesized that working memory deficits in HD resulting from frontostriatal damage may account broadly for intact and impaired long-term learning and memory in HD patients.