Sullivan E V, Sagar H J
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Brain. 1989 Dec;112 ( Pt 6):1503-17. doi: 10.1093/brain/112.6.1503.
In a study of verbal temporal ordering, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were impaired in making judgements of the relative recency of serially-presented words but were normal in word recognition; by contrast, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were impaired on both verbal tasks (Sagar et al., 1985, 1988b). The present study used a nonverbal analogue of the verbal temporal ordering task to examine whether the deficit in recency discrimination of the PD patients transcended material-specific bounds or was specific to verbal material. The nonverbal task was administered to the patients with PD, patients with AD and normal control subjects studied with the verbal task. The results showed that the retention functions for the recognition of verbal and nonverbal material differed qualitatively from each other and this difference was present in all three subject groups. For verbal and nonverbal recency discrimination and verbal content recognition, performance declined with increasing retention intervals; for nonverbal content recognition, however, performance was essentially unchanging across retention intervals. As on the verbal test, recency discrimination on the nonverbal test was impaired in both patient groups. In contrast to the results with the verbal task, both groups were impaired on content recognition. The patterns of impairment, however, differed between the two patient groups in a parallel way to those of the verbal task: performance of the AD group was impaired at the longest retention intervals but not at the shortest intervals, whereas the performance of the PD group was impaired at the shortest but not at the longest intervals. This deficit in nonverbal short-term recognition memory was present even in PD patients who scored within the normal range on a quantitative test of dementia. These results show that deficits in recency discrimination and short-term memory processing in PD extend to nonverbal as well as verbal material and imply bilateral frontal lobe dysfunction in the genesis of these deficits.
在一项关于言语时间排序的研究中，帕金森病（PD）患者在判断连续呈现单词的相对新近度时受损，但在单词识别方面正常；相比之下，阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者在这两项言语任务中均受损（萨加尔等人，1985年，1988年b）。本研究使用言语时间排序任务的非言语类似物来检验PD患者在新近度辨别方面的缺陷是超越了材料特异性界限还是仅限于言语材料。对PD患者、AD患者以及参与言语任务研究的正常对照受试者进行了非言语任务测试。结果表明，言语和非言语材料识别的保持功能在性质上彼此不同，且这种差异在所有三个受试者组中均存在。对于言语和非言语新近度辨别以及言语内容识别，随着保持间隔的增加，表现会下降；然而，对于非言语内容识别，在整个保持间隔期间表现基本不变。与言语测试一样，两个患者组在非言语测试中的新近度辨别均受损。与言语任务的结果不同，两个组在内容识别方面均受损。然而，两个患者组的损伤模式与言语任务的损伤模式以平行方式不同：AD组在最长保持间隔时表现受损，但在最短间隔时未受损，而PD组在最短间隔时表现受损，但在最长间隔时未受损。即使在痴呆定量测试中得分处于正常范围的PD患者中，也存在这种非言语短期识别记忆缺陷。这些结果表明，PD患者在新近度辨别和短期记忆处理方面的缺陷扩展到了非言语以及言语材料，并暗示这些缺陷的发生涉及双侧额叶功能障碍。
