Cognitive action control allows resisting to irrelevant information to easily produce desired goal-directed behaviors. This cognitive process is disturbed in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the neural signature of this impairment has not been clarified yet. Several studies using electroencéphalography (EEG) showed that conflict situations in healthy participants are inevitably associated with a power increase of neuronal oscillations in the theta frequency band (\~4-8Hz) in the medial frontal cortex (MFC). Conflict situations are also associated with theta functional connectivity between the MFC and task-relevant brain areas. The theta power increase and connectivity are respectively interpreted as a marker of the integration of conflicting information and as a candidate for communication between the brain areas involved in implementing cognitive action control. The objective of this project is to test the hypothesis that the deficit of cognitive action control observed in PD comes from a lack of integration of the conflict information and / or communication of this information between the MFC and other task-relevant brain areas. Investigators willl study this cognitive process using a classic conflict task, the Simon task, and by recording brain activity using high density EEG coupled with cortical source connectivity analyses. The results will allow us to evaluate whether theta oscillations can serve as a marker of cognitive control disorders in Parkinson's disease.
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Difference in theta source connectivity between PD patients and matched HC in the medial-frontal-prefrontal-parietal regions following conflict situations
Timeframe: 45 minutes