Abstract
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the motor system and cognitive and behavioral functions. Due to these impairments, PD patients also have problems in using the computer. However, using computers and the Internet could help these patients to overcome social isolation and enhance information search. Specifically, avatars (defined as virtual representations of humans) are increasingly used in online environments to enhance human-computer interaction by simulating face-to-face interaction. Our laboratory experiment investigated how PD patients behave in a trust game played with human and avatar counterparts, and we compared this behavior to the behavior of age, income, education and gender matched healthy controls. The results of our study show that PD patients trust avatar faces significantly more than human faces. Moreover, there was no significant difference between initial trust of PD patients and healthy controls in avatar faces, while PD patients trusted human faces significantly less than healthy controls. Our data suggests that PD patients’ interaction with avatars may constitute an effective way of communication in situations in which trust is required (e.g., a physician recommends intake of medication). We discuss the implications of these results for several areas of human-computer interaction and neurological research.
Highlights
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common, chronic progressive disease with a median annual incidence of 14 per 100.000 increasing to 160 per 100.000 in the age group over 65 [1]
H1 states that PD patients show higher initial trust in avatar faces than in human faces
PD patients invested significantly more in trust games played against avatar faces versus games played against human faces
Summary
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common, chronic progressive disease with a median annual incidence of 14 per 100.000 increasing to 160 per 100.000 in the age group over 65 [1]. Typical symptoms include bradykinesia, resting tremor, rigidity, and impaired postural reflexes [2]. In addition to these ‘cardinal motor symptoms’, non-motor symptoms occur, even in the early stages of the disease [3]. Cognitive and behavioral disturbances include deficits in the following domains: attention, memory, visuospatial functions and decision-making [4], as well as impairment of face recognition [6]), trust [7], and ability to explain and predict other people’s behavior (referred to as Theory-of-Mind or mentalizing, e.g., [8, 9]). The underlying pathology is a dopaminergic cell loss in the substantia nigra pars compacta. Neuronal loss is reported in the following brain areas: the dorsal motor nucleus
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