THE DIFFERENTIAL-EFFECTS OF CUEING ON RECALL IN PARKINSONS-DISEASE AND NORMAL SUBJECTS

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are known to be impaired in sup raspan verbal learning due to reduced availability of internal encodin g capacity. PD patients may suffer from poor semantic, source and sequ ential processing capacity. Thirty-three patients with idiopathic PD a nd 42 matched normal control subjects (NC) were administered the Calif ornia Verbal Learning Test under 3 conditions of graded cueing. While the PD patients benefited significantly and progressively from increas ingly explicit cueing, the NC group did not since their performance wa s optimal even without cueing. Results are discussed in relation to fr ontal executive control of attentional resources and the establishment of encoding strategies, (C) 1998 Academic Press.