Face discrimination and emotion recognition in Parkinson's disease with dementia

We investigated three essential aspects of face processing capacity
in PD-D, and the associations between cognitive, neuropsychiatric assessments and task
performances. Twenty-four PD-D patients (mean age: 74.0±5.55) and eighteen age-matched healthy controls (HC) (mean age: 71.0±6.20) received three computerized tasks, morphing-face discrimination, dynamic
facial emotion recognition, and expression imitation. Compared to HC, PD-D
patients had lower sensitivity (d’) and
greater neural internal noises in discriminating faces; responded slower and had
difficulties with negative emotions; imitated some expressions but with lower
strength. Correlation analyses revealed that patients with advancing age, slow
mentation, and poor cognition (but not motor symptoms) showed stronger
deterioration in face perception. Importantly, these correlations were absent
in the age-matched HC. The present study is among the first few examined face processing in
patients with PD-D, and found consistent deficits correlated with
advancing age, slow mentation, and disturbed visual-spatial construction. We
propose that face discrimination task could be included as a
potential test for the early detection of dementia in PD.