Motor planning in Parkinson patients.

This study was designed to determine if Parkinsonian patients exhibited a deficit in motor planning. Thirty adult males, 15 with Parkinson's disease and 15 normal controls, were given a gestural test which had two components. The first component required the symbolic representation of implement usage on verbal command and on imitation (representational items) and the second component required the imitation of non-symbolic hand positions (non-representational items). The results indicated that Parkinsonian patients performed at a significantly lower gestural level on the representational tasks and made significantly more spatial errors on non-representational tasks than the normal controls.