Can patients with Parkinson’s disease learn to adjust their level of cognitive control depending on context? Adaptive control has been studied in Parkinson’s disease mainly in the context of proactive control and with mixed results. In our project we compared the ability of participants with Parkinon’s disease to age matched healthy control participants. We found evidence for proactive control to be generally impaired in PD and reduced abilities to modulate conflict information in reactive control.
High frequency deep brain stimulation is successfully used in Parkinson’s disease for the treatment of motor symptoms. Previous research has suggested that cognitive capabilities may possibly be modulated by low frequency stimulation with a peak frequency in the theta band (4 Hz). We were interested whether these low frequency stimulation effects may be band specific and affect different cognitive domains when using a peak frequency in the beta band (20 Hz). Using a selection of behavioral task we found no effect in the previously indicated cognitive control domains, but distinct improvements response selection abilities.