«CHANGE BLINDNESS» IN PARKINSON DISEASE

INTRODUCTION Parkinson Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease with an annual incidence of 10-20 cases over 100000. It is the most widespread Movement Disorder, and Motor and Non-Motor Symptoms characterize it. The Non-Motor symptoms include cognitive impairments. In the patients with PD has been reported impairments in focused attention and visual search strategies. This study aims to evaluate “Change Blindness”, i.e., the difficulty to detect changes in the visual scene, by using the Flicker Task (FT) in patients with PD. This task allows assessing attention and visual search strategies, and it also leads to evaluate whether the performance is affected by the emotional valence of the stimuli. METHOD Took part in the study:Patients with Parkinson Disease (13M,7F;y:64.55±7.9), recruited from Policlinico Umberto I in Rome; 20 Healthy Controls matched by age and sex (13M,7F;y:64.3±6.9). Both patients with PD and Healthy Controls were assessed with: Progressive Raven Matrices to evaluate IQ; MMSE to exclude a cognitive impairment; Attention Network Test-Vigilance to evaluate Vigilance; Emotional Flicker Task. RESULTS ANOVA on Response Time (RT) in Emotional Flicker Task showed slower RT in PD patients than HC (F1.38=47.5, p<0.0001, ηp2=0.55). Specifically, patients with PD showed slower RT compared to HC in both CE (18205ms vs 10185ms) and MA changes (104883ms vs 48019ms). We observed an attentional bias (TR in NEG/POS – TR in NEU) for NEG stimuli compared to POS ones (F1.38=22.40, p<0.0001, ηp2=0.37) in the PD group. No differences were observed in HC. CONCLUSION PD patients showed greater difficulties in marginal changing detection. Vigilance levels (which were not different) suggests that differences were not due to the motor slowdown typical of Parkinson Disease. Only PD patients showed greater difficulties in changing detection in images with Negative Valence. Emotional Valence could influences high cognitive load tasks. The introduction of Intelligent Quotient and Pharmacological Treatment as covariates confirmed previous results.