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Brain Advance Access originally published online on April 12, 2007
Brain 2007 130(5):1395-1407; doi:10.1093/brain/awm059
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Semantic and affective priming as a function of stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson's disease

Joanna E. Castner1, Helen J. Chenery1, David A. Copland1, Terry J. Coyne2, Felicity Sinclair2 and Peter A. Silburn2,3

1Centre for Research in Language Processing and Linguistics, Division of Speech Pathology, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland, 2St Andrew's War Memorial Hospital and The Wesley Hospital, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and 3The Eskitis Institute, Clinical Neurosciences Group, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

Correspondence to: Helen Chenery, Division of Speech Pathology, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane Queensland 4072, Australia E-mail: h.chenery{at}uq.edu.au

Lexical-semantic and emotional processing deficits have been associated with Parkinson's disease. This study investigated automatic and controlled lexical-semantic processing, the automatic activation of emotional evaluations, and the processing of words conveying negative and neutral emotional connotations in a combined affective and semantic priming paradigm. Eighteen participants with Parkinson's disease who had undergone surgery for deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) completed a lexical decision task at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), during on and off stimulation conditions. Nineteen non-neurologically impaired participants acted as controls. The results indicated that automatic lexical-semantic and emotional evaluative processes are unimpaired in Parkinson's disease as reflected in the presence of comparable semantic and affective priming effects at the short SOA in on and off stimulation conditions compared with healthy controls. In contrast, participants with Parkinson's disease in the off stimulation condition showed a pattern of aberrant controlled lexical-semantic processing as evidenced by a lack of semantic priming effects at the long SOA condition. Controlled semantic priming was present, however, when the participants with Parkinson's disease were receiving stimulation of the STN, suggesting that STN stimulation modulates basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits involved in such processes. Finally, delayed reaction times for negatively valenced targets compared with neutrally valenced targets was evident in participants with Parkinson's disease in the on stimulation condition and control participants, but not for participants with Parkinson's disease in the off stimulation condition, suggesting that the incidental evaluation of negatively versus neutrally valenced words in Parkinson's disease is modulated by basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits.

Key Words: lexical decision; emotion; deep brain stimulation; semantic priming; language processing

Abbreviations: ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; ANEW, Affective Norms for English Words; DBS, deep brain stimulation; LMM, linear mixed model; RT, reaction time; SOA, stimulus onset asynchrony; STN, subthalamic nucleus

Received December 21, 2006. Revised February 17, 2007. Accepted March 5, 2007.


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