Decision-making impairments in Parkinson's disease as a by-product of defective cost-benefit analysis and feedback processing.
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Volume
4
Pagination
317 - 327
DOI
10.2217/nmt.14.23
Journal
Neurodegener Dis Manag
Issue
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Studies examining decision-making in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) show impaired performance on a variety of tasks. However, there are also demonstrations that patients with PD can make optimal decisions just like healthy age-matched controls. We propose that the reason for these mixed findings is that PD does not produce a generalized impairment of decision-making, but rather affects sub-components of this process. In this review we evaluate this hypothesis by considering the empirical evidence examining decision-making in PD. We suggest that of the various stages of the decision-making process, the most affected in PD are (1) the cost-benefit analysis stage and (2) the outcome evaluation stage. We consider the implications of this proposal for research in this area.