The role of the basal ganglia in the control of automatic visuospatial attention

Abstract

Cognitive impairments in patients with basal ganglia dysfunction are primarily revealed where performance relies on internal, voluntary control processes. Evidence suggests that this also extends to impaired control of more automatic processes, including visuospatial attention. The present study used a non-predictive peripheral cueing paradigm to compare and contrast visuospatial deficits in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with those previously revealed in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) (Fielding et al., 2006a). Compared to age-matched controls, both PD and HD patients exhibited increased distractibility or poor fixation, however only PD patients responded erroneously to cue stimuli more frequently than control subjects. All subjects demonstrated initial facilitation for valid versus invalid cues following the shorter stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) and a performance decrement at the longer SOAs (inhibition of return), although there was a clear differentiation between these groups for immediate SOAs. Unlike both control and PD subjects, where IOR manifested between 350 and 1000 msec, IOR was evident as early as 150 msec for HD patients. Further, for PD patients, spatially valid cues resulted in hyper-reflexivity following 150 msec SOAs, with saccadic latencies shorter than those generated in response to un-cued targets. Thus contrasting deficits were revealed in PD and HD, emphasizing the important contribution of the basal ganglia in the control of more automatic behaviors