Assessing Visuospatial Skills in Parkinson's: Comparison of Neuropsychological Assessment Battery Visual Discrimination to the Judgment of Line Orientation.

OBJECTIVE

Judgment of Line Orientation (JOLO) test is widely used in assessing visuospatial deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD). The neuropsychological assessment battery (NAB) offers the Visual Discrimination test, with age and education correction, parallel forms, and co-normed standardization sample for comparisons within and between domains. However, NAB Visual Discrimination has not been validated in PD, and may not measure the same construct as JOLO.

METHOD: A heterogeneous sample of 47 PD patients completed the JOLO and NAB Visual Discrimination within a broader neuropsychological evaluation. Pearson correlations assessed relationships between JOLO and NAB Visual Discrimination performances.

RESULTS

Raw and demographically corrected scores from JOLO and Visual Discrimination were only weakly correlated. NAB Visual Discrimination subtest was moderately correlated with overall cognitive functioning, whereas the JOLO was not.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite apparent virtues, results do not support NAB Visual Discrimination as an alternative to JOLO in assessing visuospatial functioning in PD.