Lack of inhibition in Parkinson's disease: evidence from a lexical decision task

Persons affected by Parkinson's disease (PD) often show an increased semantic priming effect from target words in lexical decision tasks (hyper-priming) as compared to age-matched controls. In this study, a lexical decision task was used to investigate both semantic priming (Experiment 1) and repetition priming (Experiment 2) from distractor words in PD patients and age-matched controls. With this negative priming procedure, target words in successive trials are never related, and therefore participants always have to switch between unrelated target words. Instead, it is the distractor prime word that is either related or unrelated to the subsequent target, giving the measure of priming. Results showed that PD patients demonstrated a robust effect of positive semantic priming from distractor words. Participants from the control group did not show any semantic priming effect (positive or negative) from distractors. Similarly, PD patients showed positive repetition priming from distractor words, but the control group showed significant repetition negative priming. These results support the view that the hyper-priming effect typically shown by persons with Parkinson's disease is the result of impaired inhibitory processes required to control word activation during reading.