TY  - JOUR
AU  - Trampenau, Leif
AU  - Kuhtz-Buschbeck, Johann P.
AU  - van Eimeren, Thilo
TI  - Parkinsonian patients do not utilize probabilistic advance information in a grip-lift task
JO  - Parkinsonism & related disorders
VL  - 65
SN  - 1353-8020
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
PB  - Elsevier Science
M1  - FZJ-2019-03054
SP  - 67-72
PY  - 2019
AB  - IntroductionPatients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are known to have decision-making impairments in tasks involving probabilistic information. How PD patients utilize task-relevant probabilistic advance information to plan and initiate common motor tasks like grasping has not yet been studied.MethodsPD patients (n = 15, OFF medication) and control participants repeatedly grasped and lifted an object, the weight of which could be light, medium, or heavy. Visual cues provided explicit probabilistic information about the upcoming weight at the start of each grip-lift trial. This information allows the force of the grasping fingers to be scaled predictively so that it matches the likely weight, with a suitable rate of initial force increase. Deterministic cues announced the upcoming weight with certainty in other grip-lift trials. In a weight adjustment experiment, participants associated each probabilistic cue with a specific heaviness.ResultsThe weight adjustment experiments showed that the probabilistic cues were understood correctly. However, PD patients utilized the probabilistic information significantly less than controls during the grip-lift task. Specifically, patients did not initiate their grasp more forcefully when probabilistic cues announced a high likelihood (66.7% probability) of a heavy weight, in contrast to controls. Thus, probabilistic cues that encouraged a more vigorous action had no effect in PD. Nevertheless, patients and controls scaled their forces appropriately when deterministic cues announced the forthcoming weights unambiguously.ConclusionsPD patients do not invest a high movement effort to initiate a grip-lift unless the necessity of such a vigorous action initiation is decidedly clear.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:31105014
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000491682900010
DO  - DOI:10.1016/j.parkreldis.2019.05.015
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/862855
ER  -