Title:Enhancement of Delayed Audiovisual Response in Parkinson’s Disease: A Comparison with Normal Aged Controls
Volume: 4
Issue: 2
Author(s): Qiong Wu, Jiajia Yang, Chunlin Li, Yujie Li, Zhihan Xu, Yoshimichi Ejima, Yasuyuki Ohta, Koji Abe and Jinglong Wu
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Parkinson’s disease, audiovisual integration, cognitive functional deficits, performance enhancement.
Abstract: Background: Our brain can collaborate useful information from different
sensory stimuli automatically through multisensory integration. However, we
cannot understand visual and auditory information clearly from the TV when the
sound and graphics are out of synchronization. This is because our brain is not being
able to integrate the visual and auditory information automatically.
Objective and Method: To determine whether patients with Parkinson’s disease
(PD) have the same audiovisual integration as individuals without PD, we designed
an experiment using three groups of subjects: 17 normal younger individuals (the
NY group), 21 normal aged control individuals (the NC group) and 16 individuals
with Parkinson’s disease (the PD group). All subjects were required to press the response
key when the auditory, visual or audiovisual stimuli were presented.
Results and Conclusion: We recorded the accuracy (AC) and reaction time (RT) for each task. The
results suggest that the mean RT of the PD group was significantly longer than that of the NY and NC
groups. Interestingly, we found that patients with PD exhibited inadequate audiovisual integration and
significantly lower enhancement than the NY and NC groups, which suggests the presence of basic
cognition errors in PD patients.
