Parkinson's Disease Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Parkinson's Disease, including details on symptoms, treatment, genetics, medication.

Maintenance of response readiness in patients with Parkinson's disease: evidence from a simple reaction time task.

Stern ER, Horvitz JC, Côté LJ, Mangels JA

Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA. estern@psych.columbia.edu

The authors explored the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on the generation and maintenance of response readiness in a simple reaction time task. They compared performance of idiopathic PD patients without dementia, age-matched controls, and younger controls over short (1-, 3-, and 6-s) and long (12- and 18-s) foreperiod intervals. After each trial, the authors probed memory for visual information that also had to be maintained during the trial interval. Patients and controls did not differ overall in their ability to maintain readiness over long delays. However, within the PD group only, errors in maintaining visual information were correlated with difficulty in maintaining readiness, suggesting that systems impaired in PD may facilitate the maintenance of processing in both motor and cognitive domains.

Published 19 January 2005 in Neuropsychology, 19(1): 54-65.
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