PD Patients with Movement Problem Also Showed the Deficit of Object Representation in Movable Objects

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegeneration disease that caused by neural loss in substantial nigra, leading to the neurotransmitter, dopamine, decreases in the mid- brain. Previous studies found that PD patients have deficits in identifying animate objects (Antal, et al., 2002; Righi, et al., 2007) and in naming actions (Cotelli et al., 2007). Since most animate objects are moveable and most inanimate ones are unmovable, the main purpose here is to investigate whether PD's deficit in categorizing animate objects would be confounded with movable ones. We use the object decision task in which participants have to decide whether objects were real or not. Results showed that in comparison to age matched controls, (1) patients responded slower for animate objects than for inanimate ones; (2) they also responded slower for movable objects than for unmovable ones; (3) patients responded the worst, when animate and movable objects were presented compared to the conditions of animate or moveable objects only. We concluded that PD patients have deficit in object representation especially for the animate and movable concepts. We will discuss the relationship between PD patient's movement and the representation of movable concepts.