Visual exploration of emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with impairments in facial emotion recognition as well as visual and executive dysfunction. We investigated whether facial emotion categorization impairments in PD are attributable to visual scanning abnormalities by recording the eye movements of 16 non-demented PD and 20 healthy control (HC) participants during an emotion recognition task. We examined the influence of several factors that can affect visual scanning, including oculomotor, basic visual, and cognitive abilities (executive function). Increases in the number and duration of fixations in the top regions of surprise facial expressions were related to increases in recognition accuracy for this emotion in PD participants with left-sided motor symptom onset. Compared to HC men, HC women spent less time fixating on fearful expressions. PD participants displayed oculomotor abnormalities (antisaccades), but these were unrelated to scanning patterns. Performance on visual measures (acuity, contrast sensitivity) correlated with scanning patterns in the PD group only. Poorer executive function was associated with longer fixation times in PD and with a greater number of fixations in HC. Our findings indicate a specific relation between facial emotion categorization impairments and scanning of facial expressions in PD. PD and HC participants' scanning behaviors during an emotion categorization task were driven by different perceptual processes and cognitive strategies. Our results underscore the need to consider differences in perceptual and cognitive abilities in studies of visual scanning, particularly when examining this ability in patient populations for which both vision and cognition are impaired.

Discriminating facial expressions of emotion and its link with perceiving visual form in Parkinson's disease

“…Many have questioned whether persons with PD are also impaired their ability to perceive facial expressions of emotion. The findings from individual studies have been mixed; some studies have reported impaired perception of facial expressions of emotion in PD [5][6][7]9,10,[12][13][14][15][16]22,32,34,35,38,44,47,50,51,58,59,68] whereas others have found no such impairment [2,18,20,31,45,53,60,63,65]. Despite mixed findings from individual studies, a recent meta-analysis by Gray and TickleDegnen [30] concluded that those with PD were impaired in perceiving facial expressions of emotion and that this impairment was unrelated to the ability to perceive visual form.…”

Emotional Correlates of Unirhinal Odor Identification

“…The reduced ability to either show empathy or recognise particular emotional expressions can accompany and sometimes foreshadow the manifestation of other, often more gross, symptoms associated with fronto-temporal dementia (Cerami et al, 2014), ParkinsonÕs Disease (Clark, Neargarder & Cronin-Golomb, 2010), Autism (HappŽ & Frith, 2014), Schizophrenia (Konstantkopoulos et al, 2014) and post-traumatic stress disorder (Poljac et al, 2011). All these conditions can be difficult to distinguish from other syndromes, especially in the initial stages, and given the links demonstrated here, there is renewed reason to build on the small number of studies that 16 have started to explore the diagnostic sensitivity of smell ability in these populations.…”

Eye movements during natural actions in patients with schizophrenia

“…They also exhibit visual scanning deficits, such as longer fixation times on faces. 51 Therefore, DA level in the prefrontal cortex might play a critical role in cognitive processes in patients with schizophrenia.…”