Preference formation and working memory in Parkinson's disease and normal ageing

Recent studies in rats have suggested that the amygdala and the dorsal striatum may be differentially involved in the formation of stimulus-reward associations and stimulus-response associations, respectively. In a recent study in humans, conditioned preference learning deficits were observed in a group of patients with damage to the amygdala formation. In this study, patients with Parkinson's disease, which is known to involve pathology of the dorsal striatum, were tested on the same conditioned preference task, together with a group of patients with circumscribed lesions of the frontal lobe. Unlike patients with frontal lobe damage, patients with Parkinson's disease did not exhibit conditioned preferences. However, in this respect their behaviour was indistinguishable from that of age-matched (older) control subjects. In keeping with previous literature, working memory deficits were observed in both patients with Parkinson's disease and patients with frontal-lobe lesions. Compared to young control subjects, a strong increase in preference for familiar, versus novel, items was observed in both patients with Parkinson's disease and in older control subjects. Such a familiarity effect appears to overshadow the conditioning manipulation employed in this task and, therefore, preclude the expression of conditioned preferences in older subjects. These results suggest that there is a developmental progression in the degree to which different mechanisms of 'learning to like' are important over the life span.