| Abstract: | Visuospatial perceptual tests were administeredt0 57 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). 50normal subjects served as controls. Of the controlsonly 7 female subjects made mistakes in the tests,they were older and essentially illiterate. Thirtyeight patients (25 males and 13 females) with PDmade significantly more mistakes than the 7 femalecontrols. The patients' mean age was 10 yearsyounger and their mean duration of school attendance was 7.8 years. The visuoperceptual deficitsseem not to be a feature of glooal mental deteriora-tion. Four patients' illnesses had Iasted less than Iyear. Three of them showed frank visuospatial deficits. It is conceivable that the visuospatial perfor-mance abnormalities found in PD are mainly due tobasal ganglia (BG) damage. Visuoperceptual impair-ment was present only in tests requiring mental pro- cessing of information derived from a two dimensional picture into three-dimensional concepts. BG isprobably involved in mental processing of visuospa-tial images. |
