The impact of irrelevant dimensional variation on rule-based category learning in patients with Parkinson's disease.
This study examined the impact of irrelevant dimensional variation on rule-based category learning in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), older controls (OC), and younger controls (YC). Participants were presented with 4-dimensional, binary-valued stimuli and were asked to categorize each into 1 of 2 categories. Category membership was based on the value of a single dimension. Four experimental conditions were administered in which there were zero, 1, 2, or 3 randomly varying irrelevant dimensions. Results indicated that patients with PD were impacted to a greater extent than both the OC and YC participants when the number of randomly varying irrelevant dimensions increased. These results suggest that the degree of working memory and selective attention requirements of a categorization task will impact whether PD patients are impaired in rule-based category learning, and help to clarify recent discrepancies in the literature.
Filoteo
J Vincent
JV
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California, USA. vfiloteo@ucsd.edu
Maddox
W Todd
WT
Ing
A David
AD
Zizak
Vanessa
V
Song
David D
DD
D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation