Fractionating the Neurocognitive Mechanisms Underlying Working Memory: Independent Effects of Dopamine and Parkinson's Disease.

ABSTRACT: Deficits in working memory (WM) in Parkinson's disease (PD) are often considered to be secondary to dopaminergic depletion. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms by which dopamine causes these deficits remain highly contested, and PD is now also known to be associated with nondopaminergic pathology. Here, we examined how PD and dopaminergic medication modulate three components of WM: maintenance over time, updating contents with new information and making memories distracter-resistant. Compared with controls, patients were disproportionately impaired when retaining information for longer durations. By applying a probabilistic model, we were able to reveal that the source of this error was selectively due to precision of memory representations degrading over time. By contrast, replenishing

SUBMITTER: Fallon SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5939219 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature