Abstract
Suppression of unwanted motor responses can be disrupted by Parkinson’s disease. People with Parkinson’s (PwP) can show maladaptive reward-driven behaviours in the form of impulse control behaviours, which are associated with the use of the dopaminergic treatments used to alleviate the motor symptoms of the disease. However, the effects of Parkinson’s itself on impulsive behaviour and control are unclear—empirical studies have yielded mixed findings, and some imaging studies have shown a functional deficit in the absence of a measurable change in behaviour. Here, we investigated the effects of Parkinson’s on response activation and control by studying the dynamics of response in standard inhibitory control tasks—the Stop Signal and Simon tasks—using a continuous measure of response force. Our results are largely in favour of the conclusion that response inhibition appears to be intact in PwP, even when using a more sensitive measure of behavioural control relative to traditional button-press measures. Our findings provide some clarity as to the effects of Parkinson’s on response inhibition and show continuous response force measurement can provide a sensitive means of detecting erroneous response activity in PwP, which could also be generalised to studying related processes in other populations.
Highlights
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting around 1% of all adults over the age of 60 (Tysnes and Storstein 2017)
We found no reliable interactions between our effects of interest and symptom laterality in People with Parkinson (PwP) so the effects of symptom laterality are not reported any further
Accuracy on the Simon task was very high for both groups and in both trial types, so accuracy analyses will not be reported further
Summary
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting around 1% of all adults over the age of 60 (Tysnes and Storstein 2017). Parkinson’s is associated with significant loss of dopaminergic cells in the substantia nigra pars compacta, which in turn supplies dopamine to the dorsal striatum of the basal ganglia (Dauer and Przedborski 2003) and frontal regions (Jahanshahi et al 2015). This neural loss in Parkinson’s has a profound effect on the motor system: people with. In addition to PwP being slow to initiate and execute movements, they can have difficulty with the inhibition of pre-potent responses (e.g., Gauggel et al 2004; Nombela et al 2014). Recent estimates suggest that up to 50% of PwP develop an ICB (Corvol et al 2018), which can negatively impact on the quality of life (Leroi et al 2011; Phu et al 2014)
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