van Gemmert A W, Teulings H L, Stelmach G E
Motor Control Laboratory, Arizona State University, Tempe 85287-0404, USA.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 1998 Nov;100(1-2):161-75. doi: 10.1016/s0001-6918(98)00032-8.
This experiment tested the hypothesis that Parkinson's disease (PD) patients are more vulnerable to a moderate level of secondary task load than elderly or young controls due to heightened variability in the motor system. PD patients, elderly, and young adults performed a handwriting task with different secondary tasks. The secondary task imposed motor load (i.e., speech) and/or a mental load (i.e., ignoring, repeating, or subtracting). The findings showed that, in contrast to young and elderly controls, PD patients tended to increase MT, accumulated pause time, and normalized jerk when the secondary task consisted primarily of motor load. Furthermore, it was shown that PD patients did not reduce writing sizes as result of a high level of mental load which finding suggests that writing in an automated fashion does not result in micrographia. The results are discussed in relation to strategies imposed to contend with reduced signal-to-noise levels in the motor system.
由于运动系统变异性增加，帕金森病（PD）患者比老年人或年轻人对照组更容易受到中等程度的次要任务负荷影响。PD患者、老年人和年轻人进行了带有不同次要任务的书写任务。次要任务施加了运动负荷（即言语）和/或心理负荷（即忽略、重复或减法）。研究结果表明，与年轻人和老年人对照组不同，当次要任务主要由运动负荷组成时，PD患者倾向于增加运动时间、累积停顿时间和标准化急动度。此外，研究表明，PD患者不会因高水平的心理负荷而减小书写尺寸，这一发现表明以自动方式书写不会导致小写症。结合为应对运动系统中降低的信噪比而采取的策略对结果进行了讨论。
