Abstract

Experimental evidence indicates that the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) processes emotional/affective features crucial to elaborate knowledge about social groups and that knowledge of social concepts is stored in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL).

We investigated whether knowledge about social groups is impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD), in which dysfunctional connectivity between IFG and ATL has been demonstrated.

PD patients (N = 20) and healthy controls (HC, N = 16) were given a lexical decision task in a semantic priming paradigm: the prime-targets included 144 words and 144 pseudowords, each preceded by three types of prime (“animals,” “things,” “persons”). Out of these 288 prime-targets, forty-eight were congruent (same category) and 96 incongruent (different category). Out of 48 congruent prime-targets, 24 denoted social items and 24 nonsocial items. Thus, four types of trials were obtained: congruent social; congruent nonsocial; incongruent social; incongruent nonsocial.

Congruent target-words were recognized better than incongruent target-words by all groups. The semantic priming effect was preserved in PD; however, accuracy was significantly lower in PD than in HC in social items. No difference emerged between the two groups in nonsocial items.

Impaired processing of words denoting social groups in PD may be due to impairment in accessing the affective/emotional features that characterize conceptual knowledge of social groups, for the functional disconnection between the IFG and the ATL.

摘要

实验证据表明，额下回 (IFG) 处理的情绪/情感特征对于详细了解社会群体的知识至关重要，并且社会概念的知识存储在前颞叶 (ATL) 中。

我们调查了帕金森病 (PD) 中有关社会群体的知识是否受损，其中 IFG 和 ATL 之间的功能障碍连接已被证明。

PD 患者 ( N  = 20) 和健康对照 (HC, N  = 16) 在语义启动范式中被赋予词汇决策任务：主要目标包括 144 个单词和 144 个伪词，每个前面都有三种类型的启动 (“animals ，”“事物”，“人”）。在这 288 个主要目标中，48 个是一致的（同一类别）和 96 个不一致（不同的类别）。在 48 个全等的主要目标中，24 个表示社会项目和 24 个非社会项目。因此，获得了四种类型的试验：一致的社会试验；一致的非社会性的；不一致的社交；不一致的非社会性。

一致的目标词比不一致的目标词被所有组更好地识别。语义启动效应在 PD 中得以保留；然而，在社会项目中，PD 的准确性明显低于 HC。两组在非社交项目上没有差异。

PD 中表示社会群体的词的处理受损可能是由于访问表征社会群体概念知识的情感/情感特征的受损，因为 IFG 和 ATL 之间的功能断开。