Affiliations: Department of Physiological Psychology, University of
Bielefeld, Germany | MRI Unit, Mara Hospital, Bethel Epilepsy Center,
Bielefeld, Germany | General Psychology: Cognition, University of
Duisburg-Essen, Germany | Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance
Imaging, Essen | Institute for Advanced Study, Alfried-Krupp
Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald, Germany
Note: [] Corresponding author: Kirsten Labudda, Department of
Physiological Psychology, University of Bielefeld, P.O. Box 100131, 33501
Bielefeld, Germany. Tel.: +49 521 1064482; Fax: +49 521 1066049; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: We aimed to study whether previously described impairment in
decision making under risky conditions in patients with Parkinson's disease
(PD) is affected by deficits in using information about potential incentives or
by processing feedback (in terms of fictitious gains and losses following each
decision). Additionally, we studied whether the neural correlates of using
explicit information in decision making under risk differ between PD patients
and healthy subjects. We investigated ten cognitively intact PD patients and
twelve healthy subjects with the Game of Dice Task (GDT) to assess risky
decision making, and with an fMRI paradigm to analyse the neural correlates of
information integration in the deliberative decision phase. Behaviourally, PD
patients showed selective impairment in the GDT but not on the fMRI task that
did not include a feedback component. Healthy subjects exhibited lateral
prefrontal, anterior cingulate and parietal activations when integrating
decision-relevant information. Despite similar behavioural patterns on the fMRI
task, patients exhibited reduced parietal activation. Behavioural results
suggest that PD patients' deficits in risky decision making are dominated by
impaired feedback utilization not compensable by intact cognitive functions.
Our fMRI results suggest similarities but also differences in neural correlates
when using explicit information for the decision process, potentially
indicating different strategy application even if the interfering feedback
component is excluded.
