Authors: L Yágüez H W Lange V Hömberg
Publish Date: 2005/07/27
Volume: 253, Issue: 2, Pages: 186-193
Abstract
Parkinsons disease PD and Huntingtons disease HD patients have difficulties executing sequential movements Attention control and short–term memory probably play an important role in programming sequential movements To investigate the contribution of these cognitive factors to programming and executing visuomotor sequences in HD and PD patients a computerized version of the Corsi Block Tapping–Test was employedthe performance of 11 patients with early stage PD 11 HD patients with borderline to mild caudate atrophy and 20 healthy subjects was compared The task was a reaction time task where targets were illuminated in groups of sequences increasing from 2 items to 5 items Subjects reproduced the sequence pressing the illuminated target in the same order of appearance Reaction Times and movement times were recordedPD patients had increasing difficulties in programming and executing series greater than three components HD patients did not differ significantly from the controls although they showed a tendency to lose accuracy in the longer series Both patient groups did not differ in their attention spanIn PD although the spatial information may be well stored they have difficulty accessing it when their attention is overloaded leading to poor encoding and slow information processing This process interferes with programming and execution of movement sequences HD patients in the early stages of the illness seem to have more attention resources than PD patients so that they start to show more problems in executing visuomotor sequences with longer movement sequences than PD patients
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