Parietal damage impairs learning of a visuomotor tracking skill

This study evaluated the consequences of damage to the parietal lobe for learning a visuomotor tracking skill. Thirty subjects with a single unilateral brain lesion (13 with and 17 without parietal damage) and 23 demographically comparable healthy subjects performed the Rotary Pursuit task. For each group, time on target increased significantly across the four learning blocks. Subjects with parietal lesions had smaller improvements on the Rotary Pursuit from the 1st to the 4th block than subjects with lesions in other brain areas and healthy comparison subjects. The improvements on task performance from the 1st to the 2nd and from the 1st to the 3rd learning blocks were similar between groups. The parietal lobe appears to play an important role in the acquisition of a new visuomotor tracking skill, in particular during a relatively late phase of learning.