Visuospatial dysfunction and problem solving in Parkinson's disease

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) perform deficiently on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM), in contrast to their relatively good performance on many other problem-solving tasks. The question is raised as to whether a visuospatial deficit may account for poor RCPM performance in PD. The authors analyzed RCPM results in 50 nondemented participants with PD and 39 age-matched healthy control participants. The PD group made significantly more errors than the control group on all RCPM subtests, including the subtest that mainly assessed visuospatial function (RCPM-A). For the PD group, the composite score of other visuospatial tests, but not the composite scores of tests of executive function or verbal memory, significantly predicted performance on the RCPM-A. Visuospatial impairment in PD may arise from dysfunction of the basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuit that also includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, importantly, the posterior parietal lobes.