A MODEL FOR SPATIAL DISORDERS IN PARKINSON'S DISEASE.
Item
-
Title
-
A MODEL FOR SPATIAL DISORDERS IN PARKINSON'S DISEASE.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8319805
-
identifier
-
8319805
-
Creator
-
STERN, YAAKOV.
-
Contributor
-
Jef frey J . Rosen | Herbert D. Saltzstein
-
Date
-
1983
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Psychology, Psychobiology
-
Abstract
-
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive disorder of movement associated with degeneration in the basal ganglia and substantia nigra. In addition to motor deficits such as tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural instability, parkinsonian patients also have deficits of sequential and predictive movement that appear to represent a disorder in the higher-order control of movement. Perceptual motor deficits on cognitive tasks such as construction are commonly observed. In this study, patients with PD and controls completed a tracing task in which they traced patterns of increasing complexity presented on a vertical screen. Some patterns were presented with segments deleted and subjects were required to fill in missing segments. Tracing movements were quantified using digitizing equipment. Subjects also completed a brief test of general intellectual function, a construction test and an assessment for depression, and severity of patients' signs and symptoms of PD was rated. Patients performed more poorly than controls on complete patterns, and their errors increased more sharply than controls on patterns with missing segments. Patients' but not controls' performance on patterns with missing segments was related to performance on the construction tasks. These findings suggest that there is a perceptual motor deficit in PD that affects performance in both the tracing and construction tasks. This deficit may represent the defective participation at the basal ganglia in an efference copy system which correlates motor and sensory information in order to generate an accurate spatial representation of the environment.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Psychology
