Dual task performance in huntington's disease: A comparison of choice reaction time tasks

This study investigated whether dual tasks make disproportionately high demands in Huntington's disease (HD) compared with controls, and also tested the Multiple Resources Theory. Method: Thirteen HD participants and 13 controls completed 2 dual task sets that varied in difficulty and complexity: Set 1 paired simple choice reaction time (RT) with digit forward, and Set 2 paired complex choice RT with digit backward. Results: We found that HD participants were overall slower; however, although they maintained similar levels of accuracy in the simple choice RT tasks with controls, their accuracy decreased in the complex choice RT tasks. In addition, we found that HD participants were more susceptible to speed-accuracy trade-offs. Despite that, they did not show greater dual task costs than controls. Conclusions: Overall, our findings do not support the Multiple Resources Theory, but they do provide some support for the Unitary Resource Theory and the attentional impairment hypothesis.