Abstract
Several studies have found dual tasking to be impaired in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but unaffected by healthy ageing. It is not known if this deficit is specific to AD, or also present in other neurodegenerative disorders that can occur in later life, such as Parkinson's disease (PD). Therefore, this study investigated dual tasking in 13 people with PD, 26 AD and 42 healthy age-matched controls. The people with AD demonstrated a specific impairment in dual tasking, which worsened with increasing disease severity. The people with PD did not demonstrate any deficits in dual tasking ability, when compared to healthy controls, suggesting that the dual task impairment is specific to AD.
Highlights
IntroductionWhen the two tasks involve similar processes (e.g. verbal processing), they are thought to compete for the same, limited, set of cognitive resources, leading to a bottleneck in processing and large dual task decrement [39,53]
Several studies have reported that dual tasking is unaffected by healthy ageing but significantly impaired in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) [6,8,21,24,28,33,37,40,41,42,56]
The main aim of the present study was to determine if dual tasking impairment was specific to AD, or affected by another neurodegenerative condition, namely Parkinson’s disease (PD)
Summary
When the two tasks involve similar processes (e.g. verbal processing), they are thought to compete for the same, limited, set of cognitive resources, leading to a bottleneck in processing and large dual task decrement [39,53]. When these two tasks involve separate processes (e.g. verbal and visuospatial processing), the two tasks are thought to be performed in parallel, resulting in no cognitive conflict and minimal dual task decrement [15,21,22,23,24,26,32,41]. This latter type of dual task is thought to rely upon a coordination function, which is one of the executive resources available within working memory [7]
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