Prospective memory in Parkinson disease and healthy aging during a Virtual Week
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1
Washington University School of Medicine, United States
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2
Washington University in St. Louis, United States
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3
Australian Catholic University, Australia
Healthy older adults and individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) played a computerized version of the Virtual Week game (Rendell & Craik, 2000), a prospective memory (PM) paradigm that simulates everyday PM tasks (e.g., taking medication). Participants also completed a working memory (WM) task. Previous research using Virtual Week has shown that non-repeated PM tasks with cues that are less focal to other ongoing activities produce age differences that are largely attributable to age-related differences in WM, suggesting these tasks are more demanding of executive control processes (Rose, Rendell, McDaniel, Aberle, & Kliegel, 2009). Individuals with PD have impaired executive control processes due to frontostriatal circuitry dysfunction. Accordingly, we expected that PD individuals would be especially challenged by non-repeated PM tasks with less focal cues. Confirming this prediction, results showed that individuals with PD were preferentially impaired on PM tasks that were not repeated and had less focal cues, and this deficit was reduced for repeated and more focally-cued PM tasks. Furthermore, WM may play a mediating role. These findings suggest that PD negatively impacts PM for tasks that are more demanding of executive control processes but that repetition and more focal cues may support spontaneous intention retrieval in this population.
Conference:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes, Toronto, Canada, 22 Mar - 26 Mar, 2010.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Neurologic
Citation:
Foster
ET,
McDaniel
MA,
Rendell
PG and
Rose
NS
(2010). Prospective memory in Parkinson disease and healthy aging during a Virtual Week.
Conference Abstract:
The 20th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, The frontal lobes.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.14.00158
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Received:
01 Jul 2010;
Published Online:
01 Jul 2010.
*
Correspondence:
N. S Rose, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, United States, nrose@wustl.edu