Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Department of Anatomy, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Sci Rep. 2019 Mar 4;9(1):3423. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-39294-z.
Parkinson's Disease can be understood as a disorder of motor habits. A prediction of this theory is that early stage Parkinson's patients will display fewer errors caused by interference from previously over-learned behaviours. We test this prediction in the domain of skilled typing, where actions are easy to record and errors easy to identify. We describe a method for categorizing errors as simple motor errors or habit-driven errors. We test Spanish and English participants with and without Parkinson's, and show that indeed patients make fewer habit errors than healthy controls, and, further, that classification of error type increases the accuracy of discriminating between patients and healthy controls. As well as being a validation of a theory-led prediction, these results offer promise for automated, enhanced and early diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease.
帕金森病可以被理解为一种运动习惯障碍。该理论的一个预测是，早期帕金森病患者将表现出较少的因先前过度习得的行为干扰而导致的错误。我们在熟练打字领域测试了这一预测，在这个领域，动作很容易被记录，错误也很容易被识别。我们描述了一种将错误分类为简单运动错误或习惯驱动错误的方法。我们测试了患有和不患有帕金森病的西班牙和英语参与者，结果表明，患者确实比健康对照组犯的习惯错误更少，而且，进一步地，错误类型的分类提高了区分患者和健康对照组的准确性。这些结果不仅验证了一个基于理论的预测，也为帕金森病的自动化、增强和早期诊断提供了希望。
