Multimodal visual exploration disturbances in Parkinson’s disease detected with an infrared eye-movement assessment system

Publication date: Available online 9 November 2019Source: Neuroscience ResearchAuthor(s): Kou Nagai, Yoshiyuki Kaneko, Masahiro Suzuki, Hiroko Teramoto, Akihiko Morita, Satoshi Kamei, Yusuke Watanabe, Masahiro Okada, Makoto UchiyamaAbstractParkinson’s disease (PD) reportedly show disturbed visual exploration. However, whether this disturbance is due to dysfunctional visual information processing remains unclear. To clarify the effects of PD on visual information processing when exploring for targets and to compare disease effects with aging effects, we used an infrared eye-movement assessment system. Cognitively normal PD patients (n = 13), healthy age-matched (n = 17) and young controls (n = 36) participated in this study, and were evaluated using two figure-matching tasks representing visual information processing (clock-matching and inverted clock-matching tasks) and saccade tasks representing oculomotor function. With figure-matching tasks, PD patients showed significantly larger numbers of images watched in a single trial compared to healthy age-matched controls on the inverted clock-matching task. No aging effects was found in these variables. In contrast, no disease effect was apparent for reaction time, which was significantly longer in healthy age-matched controls than in healthy young controls. For saccade tasks, PD patients showed significantly smaller saccade size than healthy age-matched controls on the antisaccade task, but no aging effects were ev...
Source: Neuroscience Research - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research