Measuring implicit sequence learning and dual task ability in mild to moderate Parkinson´s disease: A feasibility study.

We investigated the feasibility aspects of two choice reaction time tasks designed to assess implicit sequence learning and dual task ability in individuals with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease in comparison to healthy individuals. Twelve individuals with mild to moderate Parkinson's...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Malin Freidle, Hanna Johansson, Alexander V Lebedev, Urban Ekman, Martin Lövdén, Erika Franzén
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251849&type=printable
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We investigated the feasibility aspects of two choice reaction time tasks designed to assess implicit sequence learning and dual task ability in individuals with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease in comparison to healthy individuals. Twelve individuals with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease and 12 healthy individuals, all ≥ 60 years of age, were included. A serial reaction time task was used as a measure of implicit sequence learning and a similar task but with the addition of a simple counting task, was used as a measure of dual task ability. We have present thorough descriptive statistics of the data but we have refrained from any inferential statistics due to the small sample size. All participants understood the task instructions and the difficulty level of both tasks was deemed acceptable. There were indications of task fatigue that demand careful choices for how best to analyse the data from such tasks in future trials. Ceiling effects were present in several accuracy outcomes, but not in the reaction time outcomes. Overall, we found both tasks to be feasible to use in samples of individuals with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease and healthy older individuals.
ISSN:1932-6203