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

<b> </b>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, <i>morphing-face discrimination</i>, <i>dynamic facial emotion</i> <i>recognition, </i>and <i>expression imitation. </i>Compared to HC, PD-D patients had lower sensitivity<i> (d’) </i>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.