Do patients with Down's syndrome recognize Mickey Mouse?

Abstract

In 47 patients with Down's syndrome who were too retarded to understand a conventional oddball paradigm, we studied event-related potentials (ERPs) by using task-irrelevant visual stimuli. As the patients had expressed interest in Disney cartoons and books, five pictures of Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse or Peter Pan were employed as the rare stimuli, and nine ordinary scenes such as mountains as the frequent stimuli. Five sets were constructed by intermingling each rare picture with nine frequent pictures, and each picture was presented on a TV screen. ERPs to the rare stimuli (N270–P380), which were different from the averaged waveforms to frequent stimuli and electrooculograms (EOGs), were clearly recorded in 35 out of 47 patients. Only 24 of these patients had ERPs using a conventional auditory oddball paradigm. The peak latencies in patients were significantly prolonged relative to age-matched normal controls, probably due to a slowed neural processing. The amplitude in patients was slightly larger than normal controls, probably due to the patients' greater interest or surprise when confronted with the Disney characters.