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Deficits in the automatic activation of religious concepts in patients with Parkinson’s disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2009

PAUL M. BUTLER ,
PATRICK MCNAMARA  and
RAYMON DURSO
PAUL M. BUTLER*
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Neurology, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts
PATRICK MCNAMARA
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Neurology, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts
RAYMON DURSO
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Department of Neurology, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts
*
*Correspondence and reprint requests to: Paul M. Butler, Boston University School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, 72 East Concord Street, Robinson Building, 5th Floor, Room 528, Boston, MA 02118. E-mail: pmbutler@bu.edu
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Abstract

Religion is central to the lives of billions of people worldwide. To probe processing dynamics of religious cognition and its potential brain correlates, we used a novel priming procedure to assess the integrity of religious and control semantic networks in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and controls. Priming for control, but not religious, concepts was intact in PD patients. Patients with left-onset (right-forebrain disease) evidenced severe impairment activating religious concepts. We next modeled the priming performance with modified cable equations. These analyses suggested that deficient performance of PD patients on activation of religious concepts was due to a change in the time constants governing gain and rate of decay of activation in these semantic networks. These modeling results are consistent with dopaminergic dysfunction in right-sided striatal-prefrontal networks. We conclude that right striatal-prefrontal dopaminergic networks support activation of complex religious concepts but not equally complex and related control concepts. (JINS, 2010, 16, 252–261.)

Keywords

Semantic memoryNeurodegenerative disordersReligionGain/decay hypothesisFrontal lobesDopamine
Type
Research Articles
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , March 2010 , pp. 252 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The International Neuropsychological Society 2009

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