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.

Memory for time intervals is impaired in left hemi-Parkinson patients.

Koch G, Brusa L, Oliveri M, Stanzione P, Caltagirone C

Clinica Neurologica, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. giakoch@libero.it

The basal ganglia have been proposed as one of the neural correlates of timekeeping functions. Both encoding and memory retrieval components for time perception are impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD). The aim of our study was to investigate in hemi-Parkinsonian patients the existence of a specific alteration in memory for time depending on the affected side, to better understand the contribution of the left or right basal ganglia circuits in different components of time perception. Right and left hemi-PD patients performed a time reproduction task in which they were required to reproduce in the same session short (5 s) and long (15 s) time intervals, in off- and on-therapy condition. While the right hemi-PD patients overestimated the shorter interval, only the left hemi-PD group showed the memory migration effect, overestimating the shorter and underestimating the longer time intervals. These results argue for a critical involvement of the right basal ganglia in memory retrieval for time intervals, in the range of seconds.

Published 8 April 2005 in Neuropsychologia, 43(8): 1163-7.
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