Title:

Characterizing Effects of Basal Ganglia Dysfunction in Implicit-Statistical Learning: Evidence from Parkinson’s Disease

This study investigated implicit statistical learning (ISL) ability in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) to further characterize the influence of the basal ganglia degeneration on ISL. The first research aim looked to investigate ISL ability in individuals with PD in comparison to age-matched healthy controls. Additionally, the relationship between cognitive measures and ISL task performance was investigated to identify potential interactions between ISL and aspects of cognition considered to be necessary for it. In this study four participants with PD were administered an auditory ISL experimental task. In an exposure phase, participants were familiarized with a target grammar pattern. Then a test phase was administered in which participants were asked to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli in relation to the target grammar they had been exposed to. Accuracy of their performance was recorded. Participants also completed a cognitive battery to allow for a descriptive analysis of possible trends between attention, memory, and executive function and ISL performance. All participants demonstrated above-chance learning on the auditory ISL task consistent with an age-matched sample of older neurotypical adults. Furthermore, the PD participants scored within the average range for all measures on the cognitive assessments. No trends were found between measures of executive function and performance on the ISL task. These results suggest that despite degeneration of the basal ganglia, thought to be involved in ISL, individuals with PD were able to learn suggesting reliance on neural regions beyond the basal ganglia (i.e., thalamus, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus). Additionally, these results support the notion that ISL mechanisms are independent from executive functions. The results of this study help to characterize ISL mechanisms and its interactions with executive functioning in relation to language learning.

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