School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia.
J Neurol. 2015 Feb;262(2):268-76. doi: 10.1007/s00415-014-7563-9. Epub 2014 Nov 5.
Huntington's disease (HD) is associated with impairments in dual-task performance. Despite that, only a few studies have investigated dual-tasking in HD. We examined dual-task performance in 15 participants in the early stages of HD and 15 healthy controls. Participants performed direct circle tracing (able to view arm) and indirect circle tracing (arm obscured) either on their own (single tasks) or paired with serial subtraction by twos or threes (dual tasks). Overall, our results suggested that HD participants were significantly slower and less accurate than controls. Both groups were slower and less accurate when performing indirect circle tracing compared with direct circle tracing. HD participants experienced greater dual-task interference in terms of accuracy when performing direct circle tracing compared with indirect circle tracing. Despite that, controls were more inclined to speed-accuracy trade-offs compared with HD participants. Importantly, unlike controls, HD participants were not disproportionately faster when performing direct circle tracing as a single task compared with the dual-task conditions. Our results suggest that simple tasks place greater attentional demands on HD participants compared with controls. These findings support that impaired automaticity may be responsible for some of the attentional deficits manifested in HD.
亨廷顿病（HD）与双重任务表现受损有关。尽管如此，只有少数研究调查了 HD 中的双重任务。我们检查了 15 名早期 HD 患者和 15 名健康对照者的双重任务表现。参与者单独进行直接圆圈追踪（能够看到手臂）和间接圆圈追踪（手臂被遮挡），或者同时进行两位或三位的连续减数（双重任务）。总的来说，我们的结果表明，HD 患者的速度和准确性明显低于对照组。与直接圆圈追踪相比，两组在进行间接圆圈追踪时速度较慢，准确性较低。与间接圆圈追踪相比，HD 患者在进行直接圆圈追踪时的准确性受到更大的双重任务干扰。尽管如此，与 HD 患者相比，对照组更倾向于速度-准确性权衡。重要的是，与对照组不同，HD 患者在单独进行直接圆圈追踪时并不明显快于双重任务条件。我们的结果表明，简单任务对 HD 患者的注意力要求比对照组更高。这些发现支持了自动性受损可能是 HD 中表现出的一些注意力缺陷的原因。
