Social decision-making in Parkinson’s disease

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) commonly affects cognition and communicative functions, including the ability to perceive socially meaningful cues from nonverbal behavior and spoken language (e.g., a speaker’s tone of voice). However, we know little about how people with PD use social information to make decisions in daily interactions (e.g., decisions to trust another person) and whether this ability rests on intact cognitive functions and executive/decision-making abilities in nonsocial domains.

Method

Non-demented adults with and without PD were presented utterances that conveyed differences in speaker confidence or politeness based on the way that speakers formulated their statement and their tone of voice. Participants had to use these speech-related cues to make trust-related decisions about interaction partners while playing the Trust Game. Explicit measures of social perception, nonsocial decision-making, and related cognitive abilities were collected.

Results

Individuals with PD displayed significant differences from control participants in social decision-making; for example, they showed greater trust in game partners whose voice sounded confident and who explicitly stated that they would cooperate with the participant. The PD patients displayed relative intact social perception (speaker confidence or politeness ratings) and were unimpaired on a nonsocial decision-making task (the Dice game). No obvious relationship emerged between measures of social perception, social decision-making, or cognitive functioning in the PD sample.

Conclusions

Results provide evidence of alterations in decision-making restricted to social contexts in PD individuals with relatively preserved cognition with minimal changes in social perception. Researchers and practitioners interested in how PD affects social perception and cognition should include assessments that emulate social interactions, as non-interactive tasks may fail to detect the full impact of the disease on those affected.

KEYWORDS:

• Neurodegenerative illness
• social perception
• speech prosody
• language processing
• trust game

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alexandra Topilova for support in recruiting and testing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Discovery Grant RGPIN/2016-04373), the Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (Research Incubator award), and a James McGill Professor award from McGill University to MDP.