Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are believed to involve brain regions that are innervated by the dopaminergic pathway. Although dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain deteriorate in Parkinson’s disease (PD), it remains unclear whether intrinsic motivation is impaired in PD patients. To address this issue, we investigated intrinsic motivation in PD patients using a task designed to assess the “Pandora effect,” which constitutes a curiosity for resolving uncertainty, even if this curiosity is likely to result in negative consequences. Twenty-seven PD patients and 27 age-matched healthy controls (HCs) completed a curiosity task in which they were required to decide either to view or skip negative pictures (e.g., snakes, spiders) and an examination battery that included the Mini-Mental State Examination, a verbal fluency test, the Trail Making Test, 10-word recall tests, and questionnaires for behavioral inhibition/activation and depression. DaTSCAN images to assess the distribution of dopamine transporters in the striatum were acquired only from PD patients. The results revealed that PD patients, relative to the HCs, viewed the pictures less frequently under both the certain and uncertain conditions. However, both the PD patients and HCs viewed the pictures at a higher frequency under the uncertain condition than under the certain condition. In the PD patients, the proportion of pictures viewed under the certain condition was positively correlated with the distribution of dopamine transporters in the striatum. These results suggest that despite the overall decreasing level of interest in viewing negative pictures, the motivation to resolve uncertainty is relatively intact in PD patients.

内在和外在动机都被认为涉及受多巴胺能通路支配的大脑区域。尽管中脑中的多巴胺能神经元在帕金森病 (PD) 中恶化，但仍不清楚 PD 患者的内在动机是否受损。为了解决这个问题，我们使用旨在评估“潘多拉效应”的任务调查了 PD 患者的内在动机，这构成了解决不确定性的好奇心，即使这种好奇心可能会导致负面后果。27 名 PD 患者和 27 名年龄匹配的健康对照 (HC) 完成了一项好奇心任务，要求他们决定查看或跳过负面图片（例如，蛇、蜘蛛）以及包括 Mini-Mental 在内的一组检查国家考试，口语流利度测试，Trail Making 测试、10 字回忆测试以及行为抑制/激活和抑郁问卷。用于评估纹状体中多巴胺转运蛋白分布的 DaTSCAN 图像仅从 PD 患者获得。结果显示，相对于 HC，PD 患者在特定和不确定条件下查看图片的频率较低。然而，在不确定条件下，PD 患者和 HCs 都比在特定条件下以更高的频率查看图片。在PD患者中，特定条件下观看图片的比例与纹状体中多巴胺转运蛋白的分布呈正相关。这些结果表明，尽管观看负面图片的兴趣总体下降，