Deficit in evaluating pre-determined sequences of script events in patients with Parkinson's disease

The purpose of the present study was to assess how the striato-frontal system contributes to the manipulation of goal-directed actions. We studied a group of ten patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) in order to investigate which aspects of action knowledge processing are impaired and to define the conditions under which the deficits may occur. PD patients committed errors of sequence and inserted distractors in tasks that required them to order pre-determined events belonging to a given script in a typical sequence. Rather than attributing errors of event sequencing to a deficit of script "syntax" knowledge, we suggest that the difficulties manifested by PD patients were due to an impairment of a switching mechanism that is necessary for processing information in parallel.