Semantic Priming in Parkinsons Disease: Evidence for Delayed Spreading Activation

• Published in: Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 502 - 519
• Main Authors: Arnott, Wendy L., Chenery, Helen J., Murdoch, Bruce E., Silburn, Peter A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Colchester Taylor & Francis Group 01.08.2001; Taylor & Francis
• Subjects: Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Aged; Arousal - physiology; Attention - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Cerebral Cortex - physiopathology; Cortical Spreading Depression - physiology; Dementia - diagnosis; Dementia - physiopathology; Dementia - psychology; Diagnosis, Differential; Female; Geriatrics; Humans; Male; Medical sciences; Mental Recall - physiology; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Paired-Associate Learning - physiology; Parkinson Disease - diagnosis; Parkinson Disease - physiopathology; Parkinson Disease - psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reaction Time - physiology; Reference Values; Human; Semantic relation; Nervous system diseases; Cognitive disorder; Priming effect; Parkinson disease; Activation; Cerebral disorder; Central nervous system disease; Semantic network; Adult; Strategy; Degenerative disease; Elderly; Extrapyramidal syndrome
• ISSN: 1380-3395; 1744-411X
• DOI: 10.1076/jcen.23.4.502.1224

Nineteen persons with Parkinsons disease (PD) and 19 matched control participants completed a battery of online lexical decision tasks designed to isolate the automatic and attentional aspects of semantic activation within the semantic priming paradigm. Results highlighted key processing abnormalities in PD. Specifically, persons with PD exhibited a delayed time course of semantic activation. In addition, results suggest that experimental participants were unable to implicitly process prime information and, therefore, failed to engage strategic processing mechanisms in response to manipulations of the relatedness proportion. Results are discussed in terms of the Gain/Decay hypothesis (Milberg, McGlinchey-Berroth, Duncan, Higgins, 1999) and the dopaminergic modulation of signal to noise ratios in semantic networks.