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Patients in the early stages of Parkinson's disease were compared with patients who had sustained damage specific to either the frontal or temporal lobes and normal controls on a delayed alternation task, a test of the left right orientation and a prism adaptation task. On the former two tasks age accounted for more of the variability in performance than did site of brain lesion. However, patients with frontal lobe, right temporal lobe or basal ganglia damage were significantly impaired on the adaptation task. The results are discussed with regard to "switching", "sequencing" and "internal guidance" of movement hypotheses.

Sixteen patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease were selected who were all showing severe fluctuations in motor function ("on-off" phenomenon). Measures of cognitive function and of subjective affect/arousal state were taken on two occasions, once when "on" and once when "off". Twenty-five matched normal controls were also assessed on the same measures. Results revealed, on the average, a drop in cognitive function plus an adverse swing in affect/arousal state, in the patient group in the "off" condition, compared to the levels when "on". Analysis of the data suggested that the main factor associated with cognitive function when "off" was not the severity of disability but the level of affect/arousal. The fluctuations in cognitive function found tended to be mild relative to the severe changes in motor ability, and were present in only a proportion of patients.

It is known that in animals learning is disrupted by caudate lesions; but there has been no agreement about whether pathology in the basal ganglia causes a similar impairment in man. Nineteen patients in the early stages of Parkinson's disease were tested on two associative learning tasks and on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task; and their performance was compared with that of patients with frontal or temporal lobe lesions. On the two associative learning tasks there was no overall difference between the Parkinsonian group and the controls. However, a minority of the Parkinsonian patients performed very poorly on these tasks; and it was noted that these tended to be the older patients.

Patients in the early stages of Parkinson's disease were compared with patients who had sustained damage specific to either the frontal or temporal lobes and normal controls on a number of sequencing tests. These tests involved the reproduction of sequences of hand gestures, sequences tapped out on blocks, and sequences of digits. Only the groups with frontal lobe lesions or right temporal lobectomies were impaired on any of these tasks, though no group was impaired on all of the sequencing tasks.