Competition between Tool and Hand Motion Impairs Movement Planning in Limb Apraxia

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-15-2025

Comments

This article is the author's final published version in Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 45, Issue 42, October 2025, Article number e0692252025.

The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0692-25.2025. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s).

Embargoed until April 15, 2026.

Abstract

Tool use is a complex motor planning problem. Prior research suggests that planning to use tools involves resolving competition between different tool-related action representations. We therefore reasoned that competition may also be exacerbated with tools for which the motions of the tool and the hand are incongruent (e.g., pinching the fingers to open a clothespin). If this hypothesis is correct, we should observe marked deficits in planning the use of incongruent as compared with congruent tools in individuals with limb apraxia following left hemisphere stroke (LCVA), a disorder associated with abnormal action competition. We asked 34 individuals with chronic LCVA (14 females) and 16 matched neurotypical controls (8 females) to use novel tools in which the correspondence between the motions of the hand and tool-tip were either congruent or incongruent. Individuals with LCVA also completed background assessments to quantify apraxia severity. We observed increased planning time for incongruent as compared with congruent tools as a function of apraxia severity. Further analysis revealed that this impairment predominantly occurred early in the task when the tools were first introduced. Lesion-symptom mapping analyses revealed that lesions to posterior temporal and inferior parietal areas were associated with impaired planning for incongruent tools. A second experiment on the same individuals with LCVA revealed that the ability to gesture the use of conventional tools was impaired for tools rated as more incongruent by a normative sample. These findings suggest that tool-hand incongruence evokes action competition and influences the tool-use difficulties experienced by people with apraxia.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Language

English

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS