Neuropsychologia. 2013 Nov 19. pii: S0028-3932(13)00386-2. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.10.024. [Epub ahead of print]
Osman M, Ryterska A, Karimi K, Tu L, Obeso I, Speekenbrink M, Jahanshahi M.
Source
Biological and Experimental Psychology Centre, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, United Kingdom; Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCL Institute of Neurology, 33 Queen Square, London WC1N 3 BG, United Kingdom; Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom.
Abstract
In the present study we address the following questions: (1) How is performance affected when patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) perform a dynamic decision making task? (2) Does dopaminergic medication differentially affect dynamic decision making? Participants were trained with different goals during learning: either they made intervention-based decisions or prediction-based decisions during learning. The findings show that overall there is an advantage for those trained to intervene over those trained to predict. In addition, the results are the first demonstration that PD patients 'ON' (N=20) compared to 'OFF' L-Dopa (N=15) medication and also relative to healthy age matched controls (N=16) showed lower levels of relative improvement in the accuracy of their decisions in a dynamic decision making task, and tended to use sub-optimal strategies. These findings provide support for the 'Dopamine Overdose' hypothesis using a novel decision making task, and suggest that executive functions such as decision making can be adversely affected by dopaminergic medication in PD.
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