Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 35, Issue 10, October 1997, Pages 1413-1422
Neuropsychologia

The time course of spatial and object learning in Parkinson's disease

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3932(97)00054-7Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open archive

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by spatial memory dysfunction, but the selectivity of the deficit remains unclear. We addressed this issue by comparing performance on spatial and object variants of a conditional associative learning task, and by analysing the data with time series analytical techniques. The 11 PD subjects and 15 normal control subjects learned stimulus-stimulus pairings through trial-and-error learning. PD subjects were selectively imapired on the spatial condition: they required more trials to achieve criterion, learned at a slower rate and displayed a working memory deficit. The groups did not differ in the object condition. These results suggest a distinction between material-specific spatial and object visual memory systems. Further, they indicate that spatial learning and memory are selectively impaired in early PD, suggesting that interactions between the basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex are important for the mediation of high-level cognition.

Keywords

working memory
memory
dopamine
basal ganglia
caudate nucleus

Cited by (0)