Tuladhar, Darshana
(2013)
AN EXAMINATION OF CONCURRENT DISCRIMINATION LEARNING WITHIN INDIVIDUALS WITH PARKINSON’S DISEASE.
Master's Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
The main focus of this research is to further understand memory formation by examining the role of the basal ganglia in learning. Broadly, this study examines how the basal ganglia may play a role in a task that has been associated with declarative memory mechanisms, in this case the concurrent discrimination task (CDT). Specifically, we examine how performance is affected on the CDT when structures of the basal ganglia are compromised by recruiting individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Past work examining the performance of individuals with PD on a CDT have had contradicting results and have proposed that participants may adopt different strategies that rely variously either on declarative or non-declarative strategy (Moody et. al., 2010). We aimed to reduce strategy differences by making changes in stimuli, increasing the number of stimuli significantly, increasing the number of learning blocks, and making all participants explicitly aware of the task structure and goals. By making the goals explicit, we predicted that we would engage a declarative mechanism in both PD and control individuals. To examine declarative memory formation we used the Remember Know task (RK). However, since used a significantly larger set size of stimuli we hypothesized that individuals with PD would perform significantly worse on the CDT than control individuals. The current study reveals that there are no significant differences in performance between individuals with PD and control participants on both the CDT and RK task. We attribute these results to design of our paradigm and stimuli which may have influenced individuals to engage in declarative strategies to perform the CDT reasonably well.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
18 October 2013 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
2 August 2013 |
| Approval Date: |
18 October 2013 |
| Submission Date: |
16 August 2013 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
53 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Psychology |
| Degree: |
MS - Master of Science |
| Thesis Type: |
Master's Thesis |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Parkinson's disease, memory, learning, concurrent discrimination learning, declarative memory, non-declarative memory |
| Date Deposited: |
18 Oct 2013 15:18 |
| Last Modified: |
19 Dec 2016 14:41 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/19688 |
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