Time estimation in Parkinson's disease: normal long duration estimation despite impaired short duration discrimination

It has been claimed that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are deficie nt in estimating and reproducing rime intervals in the range of seconds. Th is deficit is more severe when subjects are requested to count internally d uring the demanded intervals, and when the rate of internal counting is fas t. The observed deficit might therefore reflect slow internal counting, i.e . motor slowness, rather than a specific deficit of temporal processing. Ho wever, PD patients also have a higher temporal discrimination threshold for sensory stimuli, a finding purportedly indicating a slow 'internal clock'. In this study we examined PD patients' processing of short durations (appr ox. 1 s, 'psychological present') and long durations (up to 48 s, 'extended present'). In the first experiment the ability to discriminate between tem porally overlapping presentations of two visual stimuli (darkened rectangle s on the computer screen) in the range of one second was tested. In the sec ond experiment PD patients' ability to estimate time intervals between 12 a nd 48 s was investigated. During these intervals, subjects were required to tap and read a random number on the computer screen at a rate of 1 Hz. We found that the patients were impaired at discriminating between short inter vals. This deficit was independent of task difficulty and appeared to be ba sed on an impairment of divided attention. Despite this deficit, the PD pat ients estimated time intervals up to 48 s as accurately as the controls. We suggest that time estimation, i.e. the feeling for the flow of time, is no rmal in PD patients despite impaired discrimination of brief intervals in t he range of seconds.