Many studies have shown that Parkinson's disease (PD) affects not only the ability to generate voluntary saccades but also the ability to suppress reflexive saccades (hyper-reflexivity). To further investigate these apparently contradictory effects of PD on the saccade system we adapted a well-known dual-task paradigm (Deubel, 2008) to measure saccades with and without a peripheral discrimination task. Previously we reported that the concurrent performance of a perceptual discrimination task abnormally reduced the latencies of reflexive saccades in PD. Here we report the effects of the concurrent discrimination task on the generation of voluntary saccades in a PD and a control group. As expected, when saccades were performed without the discrimination task the PD group made voluntary saccades with longer latencies and smaller gain than the control group. The concurrent performance of the perceptual discrimination task facilitated the initiation of voluntary saccades in both groups, but, surprisingly, this facilitatory effect was stronger in the PD group than in the control group. In addition, in the PD group voluntary saccades were abnormally facilitated by the peripheral symbol-changes that occur during saccade planning in this paradigm. The results of this study may help to clarify apparently contradictory oculomotor abnormalities observed in PD.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 25 January 2015.
All research outputs
#16,752,019
of 24,641,327 outputs
Outputs from European Journal of Neuroscience
#4,732
of 6,075 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#123,471
of 190,769 outputs
Outputs of similar age from European Journal of Neuroscience
#57
of 83 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 24,641,327 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 21st percentile – i.e., 21% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 6,075 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 7.7. This one is in the 11th percentile – i.e., 11% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 190,769 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 25th percentile – i.e., 25% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 83 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 20th percentile – i.e., 20% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
