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Brain Advance Access originally published online on July 22, 2003
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Brain, Vol. 126, No. 9, 2081-2092, September 2003
© 2003 Guarantors of Brain
doi: 10.1093/brain/awg210

Orienting of attention and Parkinson’s disease: tactile inhibition of return and response inhibition

Ellen Poliakoff1, Donald J. O’Boyle2, A. Peter Moore3, Francis P. McGlone4, Frederick W. J. Cody1 and Charles Spence5

1 School of Biological Sciences, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, Manchester, 3 Department of Neuroscience, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, 4 Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Unilever Research, The Wirral and 5 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Correspondence to: Ellen Poliakoff, Department of Psychology, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK E-mail: Ellen{at}Poliakoff.org.uk

There is growing evidence for cognitive impairments in Parkinson’s disease (PD), including in the orienting of attention and inhibition of return (IOR). IOR refers to the slowing of a response to a target stimulus presented in the same location as a previous stimulus. While some researchers have reported normal levels of visual IOR in PD patients using cue-target tasks, others have reported significant reductions in IOR in this patient group. However, the inhibitory effects observed in cue-target tasks may reflect non-ocular response inhibition associated with withholding a response from the cue stimulus, rather than attentional or oculomotor processes. Many researchers working with normal participants have circumvented this confound by using a target-target task, in which a response is made to all peripheral stimuli. Here, we compared IOR measured in cue-target and target-target tasks, using tactile rather than visual stimuli. Both the PD and the control groups exhibited significant inhibitory effects in the cue-target task, but only the control group exhibited significant IOR in the target-target task. Our results demonstrate a reduction, or elimination, of IOR in PD and this change may have been underestimated in previous studies, in which methodologically flawed cue-target tasks were used. This reduction in IOR may reflect impaired inhibitory processes or hyper-reflexive orienting in parkinsonian patients.


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