title: Visuospatial dysfunction and problem solving in Parkinson's disease.
abstract: Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) perform deficiently on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM), in contrast to their relatively good performance on many other problem-solving tasks. The question is raised as to whether a visuospatial deficit may account for poor RCPM performance in PD. The authors analyzed RCPM results in 50 nondemented participants with PD and 39 age-matched healthy control participants. The PD group made significantly more errors than the control group on all RCPM subtests, including the subtest that mainly assessed visuospatial function (RCPM-A). For the PD group, the composite score of other visuospatial tests, but not the composite scores of tests of executive function or verbal memory, significantly predicted performance on the RCPM-A. Visuospatial impairment in PD may arise from dysfunction of the basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuit that also includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, importantly, the posterior parietal lobes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Boston University, Massachusetts 02215, USA. alicecg@bu.edu
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cronin-Golomb
authors.forename: A E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Braun
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*