Exploring reward-related attention selectivity deficits in Parkinson’s disease

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 11; no. 1; p. 18751
• Main Authors: Pilgrim, Matthew J. D., Ou, Zhen-Yi Andy, Sharp, Madeleine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 21.09.2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 631/378/1689/1718; 631/378/1788; 631/378/2649/1310; Aged; Attention; Attention task; Case-Control Studies; Cognitive ability; Dopamine; Dopamine receptors; Female; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Movement disorders; multidisciplinary; Neurodegenerative diseases; Neuropsychological Tests; Parkinson Disease - physiopathology; Parkinson Disease - psychology; Parkinson's disease; Reinforcement; Resource allocation; Reward; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Task Performance and Analysis; Visual perception
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-97526-7

An important aspect of managing a limited cognitive resource like attention is to use the reward value of stimuli to prioritize the allocation of attention to higher-value over lower-value stimuli. Recent evidence suggests this depends on dopaminergic signaling of reward. In Parkinson’s disease, both reward sensitivity and attention are impaired, but whether these deficits are directly related to one another is unknown. We tested whether Parkinson’s patients use reward information when automatically allocating their attention and whether this is modulated by dopamine replacement. We compared patients, tested both ON and OFF dopamine replacement medication, to older controls using a standard attention capture task. First, participants learned the different reward values of stimuli. Then, these reward-associated stimuli were used as distractors in a visual search task. We found that patients were generally distracted by the presence of the distractors but that the degree of distraction caused by the high-value and low-value distractors was similar. Furthermore, we found no evidence to support the possibility that dopamine replacement modulates the effect of reward on automatic attention allocation. Our results suggest a possible inability in Parkinson’s patients to use the reward value of stimuli when automatically allocating their attention, and raise the possibility that reward-driven allocation of resources may affect the adaptive modulation of other cognitive processes.