Simple Reaction Time and Predictive Tracking in Parkinson's Disease: Do They Converge on a Single, Fixed Impairment of Preparation?

Abstract

Patients with Parkinson's disease exhibit a number of abnormalities that seem more marked in circumstances in which stimulus and response are predictable in advance. In this article, we consider the prolonged movement onset latencies exhibited by Parkinsonian subjects in the tracking of predictable targets and in the simple reaction time (RT) task. It has been suggested that the performance impairments on both these tasks stem from a common planning deficit. We argue that the Parkinsonian tendency to refrain from predictive tracking cannot be ascribed to an inability to anticipate due to a planning deficit. The data are better accommodated by our alternative thesis that when Parkinsonians' response initiation lags behind that of normal subjects, this is a result of a strategic adaptation to an impairment of the accuracy of movements guided by an internal representation of the target. Our conclusion, that the primary impairment of predictive tracking is one of inaccurate movement execution rather than delayed response initiation, precludes postulation of the same deficit as the source of the selective prolongation of simple RT sometimes found in Parkinson's disease. Moreover, an analysis of the processing demands of the two tasks shows that the predictability that characterizes each of them is quite different in nature. Hence, the impairments in predictive tracking and simple RT tasks are unlikely to stem from a single mechanism that is defective in Parkinson's disease.

Key Words:

• oculomotor
• Parkinson's disease
• prediction
• reaction time