Deficits in the automatic activation of religious concepts in patients with Parkinson’s disease

Religion is central to the lives of billions of people worldwide. To probe processing dynamics of religious cognition and its potential brain correlates, we used a novel priming procedure to assess the integrity of religious and control semantic networks in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 2010-03, Vol.16 (2), p.252-261
Main Authors: BUTLER, PAUL M., MCNAMARA, PATRICK, DURSO, RAYMON
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automatism
Brain - physiopathology
Cognition & reasoning
Corpus Striatum - physiopathology
Dopamine
Dopamine - physiology
Executive function
Female
Frontal lobes
Functional Laterality - physiology
Gain/decay hypothesis
Humans
Knowledge
Male
Memory
Metabolism
Middle Aged
Neurodegeneration
Neurodegenerative disorders
Neuropsychological Tests
Neuropsychology
Parkinson Disease - diagnosis
Parkinson Disease - physiopathology
Parkinson's disease
Prefrontal Cortex - physiopathology
Religion
Religion and Psychology
Semantic memory
Semantics
Severity of Illness Index
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Religion is central to the lives of billions of people worldwide. To probe processing dynamics of religious cognition and its potential brain correlates, we used a novel priming procedure to assess the integrity of religious and control semantic networks in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and controls. Priming for control, but not religious, concepts was intact in PD patients. Patients with left-onset (right-forebrain disease) evidenced severe impairment activating religious concepts. We next modeled the priming performance with modified cable equations. These analyses suggested that deficient performance of PD patients on activation of religious concepts was due to a change in the time constants governing gain and rate of decay of activation in these semantic networks. These modeling results are consistent with dopaminergic dysfunction in right-sided striatal-prefrontal networks. We conclude that right striatal-prefrontal dopaminergic networks support activation of complex religious concepts but not equally complex and related control concepts. (JINS, 2010, 16, 252–261.)
ISSN:1355-6177
1469-7661
DOI:10.1017/S1355617709991202