Parkinson's disease study with virtual week manipulated for emotional valence

Objective: This study investigated the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on prospective memory (PM) tasks with varying the emotional content of the PM actions. Background: Prospective memory, or remembering to carry out previously formed intentions at the appropriate moment, is a complex cognitive construct that has received increasing attention in PD. PM dysfunctions in PD patients can be very frustrating and limit patients’ everyday independence. Previous studies conducted with healthy older adults have demonstrated that presenting stimuli with emotional content (negative and positive valence) affect PM performance in the way that stimuli with emotional valences are better remembered compared with neutral stimuli. Methods: Twenty‐one older adults with PD (M=9, F=12) without diagnosis of dementia, and 25 healthy older adults (M=10, F=15) took part in the present study. Virtual Week task, a computer based memory task that simulates everyday prospective memory activities was used. Participants performed three virtual days in which they were required to remember to perform 8 PM actions. We manipulated the emotional content of the PM actions so participants every virtual day performed actions with positive (i.e. “tell Roberta that Maria had a baby girl when you talk to Roberta”), negative (i.e. “visit your friend at the hospital when you go shopping”) or neutral (“buy the bus tickets after breakfast”) content. Immediately following each virtual day, participants completed a recognition test to assess their retrospective memory for the various prospective memory tasks. Participants also performed a complete neuropsychological evaluation. Results: PD patients were less accurate than controls and there was also a main effect of emotional valence indicating that all participants were more accurate on positive PM tasks than both negative and neutral. Participants did not differ on negative compared to neutral PM tasks. Thus there was a positive enhancement effect but no negative enhancement or impairment when comparing PM performance on emotionally valence tasks with neutral tasks. To clarify the impact of emotional valence positivity and negativity enhancement/impairment indexes were calculated, the positivity enhancement was greater than zero for participants with Parkinson's. Conclusions: Our study confirmed PM impairment in PD patients and extended previous findings showing how emotional valence can manipulate PM performance.