Is impaired memory for spatial location in Parkinson's disease domain specific or dependent on ‘strategic’ processes?

Spatial memory has been found to be impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD). To determine the nature of the deficit, we compared the performance of ‘standard’ levodopa-treated patients with PD to that of matched control subjects in different situations: (i) spatial versus verbal conditional associ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuropsychologia 1998, Vol.36 (1), p.1-9
Main Authors: Pillon, Bernard, Deweer, Bernard, Vidailhet, Marie, Bonnet, Anne-Marie, Hahn-Barma, Valérie, Dubois, Bruno
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aged
Antiparkinson Agents - therapeutic use
Attention
attentional resources
Biological and medical sciences
Cerebral Cortex - pathology
Degenerative and inherited degenerative diseases of the nervous system. Leukodystrophies. Prion diseases
Dopamine - metabolism
dopaminergic depletion
Female
Geriatrics
Humans
Learning
Levodopa - therapeutic use
Male
Medical sciences
Memory
Middle Aged
Neurology
Parkinson Disease - drug therapy
Parkinson Disease - psychology
Parkinson's disease
Photic Stimulation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
strategic memory processes
Visual Cortex - pathology
visuospatial learning
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Summary:Spatial memory has been found to be impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD). To determine the nature of the deficit, we compared the performance of ‘standard’ levodopa-treated patients with PD to that of matched control subjects in different situations: (i) spatial versus verbal conditional associative learning; (ii) ‘global’ versus ‘local’ contextual encoding; (iii) pattern span and related supraspan learning. The relationship between dopaminergic depletion, which characterizes the disease, and the impaired memory processes was investigated by comparing the performance of ‘de novo’ not yet treated PD patients to that of matched control subjects. Both groups of PD patients were impaired in all situations requiring strategic processes, shared a decreased pattern span and had a normal visuospatial learning once the pattern span was taken into account. All these results suggest that the memory deficit for spatial location observed in PD results mainly from a disturbance of strategic processes and from decreased attentional resources, which may be due, at least in part, to the dopaminergic depletion and related striatofrontal dysfunction.
ISSN:0028-3932
1873-3514
DOI:10.1016/S0028-3932(97)00102-4