Functional Movement Disorders (FMDs) are characterized by uncontrollable
body movements or postures. Because the disease has no known neurological
mechanism, its diagnosis is ambiguous and time-consuming. The lack of a
sense of agency over body movements is a salient feature of FMD patients.
We developed two behavioral tasks that can quantify people's volition of
movement to improve the diagnostic efficiency of FMDs. A new dot-trajectory
task measures participants' sensorimotor metacognition, and the Daw
two-step decision-making task assesses participants' choice of
action-selection strategies. Here, we validated each task in healthy
subjects (N = 253) and hypothesized performance contrasts between FMD
patients and healthy controls. Patient data will be collected in
collaboration with the UCLA Brain Research Institute in the future. By
implementing this novel battery of tasks, we hope to improve both diagnosis
and our understanding of the underlying pathology of FMDs.