Exploring Biological Motion Processing in Parkinson’s Disease Using Temporal Dilation

Abstract

Biological motion (BM) perception is the compelling ability of the visual system to perceive complex animated movements effortlessly and promptly. A recent study has shown that BM can automatically lengthen perceived temporal duration independent of global configuration. The present study aimed mainly to investigate this temporal dilation effect of BM signals in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. We used the temporal dilation effect as an implicit measure of visual processing of BM. In all, 32 PD patients (under off-therapy conditions) and 32 healthy controls (HCs) participated in our study. In each trial, an upright BM sequence and an inverted BM sequence were presented within an interval in the center of the screen. We tested both canonical and scrambled BM sequences; the scrambled ones were generated by disturbing the global configuration of the canonical ones but preserving exactly the same local motion components. Observers were required to make a verbal two-alternative forced choice response to indicate which interval (the first or the second) appeared longer. Statistical analyses were conducted on the points of subjective equality (PSEs). We found that the temporal dilation effect was significantly reduced for PD patients compared with HCs in both canonical and scrambled BM conditions. Moreover, no temporal dilation effects of scrambled BM were shown in both early- and late-stage PD patients, while the temporal dilation effect of canonical BM was relatively preserved in the early stages.

Untangling the Ties Between Social Cognition and Body Motion: Gender Impact

“…Some aspects of BM processing are atypical in ASD (e.g., Klin et al, 2009;Nackaerts et al, 2012;Jack et al, 2017), schizophrenia (e.g., Kim et al, 2011;Hastings et al, 2013;Spencer et al, 2013;Hashimoto et al, 2014;Vaskinn et al, 2016Vaskinn et al, , 2018Engelstad et al, 2017Engelstad et al, , 2018aOkruszek et al, 2018) and schizotypal personality disorder (Hur et al, 2016), bipolar disorders , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Kröger et al, 2014), anxiety disorders and in individuals with elevated anxiety (van de Cruys et al, 2013;Heenan and Troje, 2015), obsessive compulsive disorders (Kim et al, 2008), and unipolar depression (Loi et al, 2013;Kaletsch et al, 2014). Deficits are also reported in individuals who were born preterm and suffer congenital brain lesions ), Alzheimer's (Henry et al, 2012;Insch et al, 2015) and Parkinson's diseases (Cao et al, 2015;Jaywant et al, 2016a,b;Kloeters et al, 2017), epilepsy (Bala et al, 2018), and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia (Zucker et al, 2013;Lang et al, 2015;Dapelo et al, 2017). Most of these disorders that are characterized by aberrant social cognition display a skewed sex ratio: females and males are affected differently in terms of clinical picture, prevalence, and severity (Pavlova, 2012(Pavlova, , 2017a.…”

From movement kinematics to social cognition: the case of autism

“…different from typical controls) is associated with atypical perception, prediction and interpretation of controls' movements, and, if atypical movements occur in various conditions-from ADHD to Parkinson's disease-the current theory implies that individuals with these conditions might exhibit socio-cognitive atypicalities. Socio-cognitive function in conditions including ADHD [135], Parkinson's disease [136] and Huntington's disease [137] is an active area of research, and it may be the case that further work in this field uncovers atypicalities in sociocognitive function that cut across traditional diagnostic labels. However, it should be noted that for many conditions there may be additional factors, such as attentional control and executive function deficits, which feed into both motor control and social cognition impairments (this also applies to autism, see below).…”

The Role of Old Photos in Reminiscence Therapy in Elderly Women With Depressive Symptoms: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

“…To determine handedness in our participants, we used the 10-item Chinese Hand Preference Questionnaire, a revised and translated version of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, which asks respondents to indicate their hand preferences for a variety of tasks including holding a pen, holding chopsticks, throwing, tooth brushing, holding scissors, striking a match, threading a needle and sewing, using a hammer, using a racket, and using a washcloth for face washing (Li, 1983). The questionnaire is widely used to determine the handedness of Chinese people (Cao et al, 2015;Sun et al, 2012). We selected participants with the same handedness to eliminate possible bias of differences in brain functional area due to handedness.…”