Visual inspection time in patients with Parkinson's disease in the presence of freezing

• Grant number: 16/17336-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: December 13, 2016
• End date: May 12, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Physical Education
• Principal Investigator: Fabio Augusto Barbieri
• Grantee: Vinícius Alota Ignácio Pereira
• Supervisor: Quincy Almeida
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
• Associated to the scholarship: 15/15928-4 - Cognitive dual-task, obstacle circumvention during walking and asymmetry: effects on motor and visual strategies in older people with Parkinson disease, BP.MS

Abstract

Individual's ability to identify physical properties of a stimulus presented within a limited time interval is called inspection time (IT), this is a simple information processing paradigm The interest in an IT task is related to perceptual speed. The measure is different of reaction time studies that are interested in the time required to select a motor response and the time required to transmit the selected motor response to the appropriate body segment. Measures of IT can thus be considered good information about processing speed. Few previous studies have examined IT in Parkinson's disease, which indicates that individuals with PD have decits in a perceptual processing. Freezing in PD is an unpredictable transient break in movement. It is perhaps the most severe motor symptom in PD and is caused by a faulty motor output from the basal ganglia. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which IT is impaired in individuals with PD that display freezing. Will participate twenty-eight patients with PD (fourteen with freezing symptoms and fourteen without freezing symptoms). IT task will be administered on an IBM-compatible desktop computer with a 15in. monitor (running at a resolution of 640 × 480pixels). All participants will make their responses with the keyboard resting on a desk, seated a comfortable distance from the computer screen. Red circular stickers indicate the relevant keys on the keyboard.