Elsevier

Schizophrenia Research

Volume 179, January 2017, Pages 97-103
Schizophrenia Research

The associations between multisensory temporal processing and symptoms of schizophrenia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2016.09.035Get rights and content

Abstract

Recent neurobiological accounts of schizophrenia have included an emphasis on changes in sensory processing. These sensory and perceptual deficits can have a cascading effect onto higher-level cognitive processes and clinical symptoms. One form of sensory dysfunction that has been consistently observed in schizophrenia is altered temporal processing. In this study, we investigated temporal processing within and across the auditory and visual modalities in individuals with schizophrenia (SCZ) and age-matched healthy controls. Individuals with SCZ showed auditory and visual temporal processing abnormalities, as well as multisensory temporal processing dysfunction that extended beyond that attributable to unisensory processing dysfunction. Most importantly, these multisensory temporal deficits were associated with the severity of hallucinations. This link between atypical multisensory temporal perception and clinical symptomatology suggests that clinical symptoms of schizophrenia may be at least partly a result of cascading effects from (multi)sensory disturbances. These results are discussed in terms of underlying neural bases and the possible implications for remediation.

Introduction

Hallucinations are a positive symptom in schizophrenia (SCZ) that can present as false perceptions in any sensory modality, but commonly take the form of perceived auditory voices. They are often conceptualized as false attribution of internal voices to an external source. As such, hallucinations in SCZ are frequently linked to the audiovisual speech-perception network, including areas of superior temporal and inferior frontal (i.e., Broca's) cortex (Jardri et al., 2011). One cognitive operation of this network is the integration of information across the auditory and visual systems, forming coherent percepts that comprise our conscious experience (Stevenson et al., 2014a). Speech is a powerful example of audiovisual integration, though integration extends to all manner of sensory inputs: we seamlessly bind together audible speech signals with their associated visual cues, affording substantial behavioral and perceptual benefits, ranging from faster response times (Raab, 1962) to improved speech perception (Sumby and Pollack, 1954) in healthy participants but not as much in SCZ patients. For example, seeing a speaker's visual articulation enhances speech perception under noisy conditions in healthy participants but less so in SCZ patients (Ross et al., 2007). Similarly, SCZ patients are less susceptible to the McGurk effect (Pearl et al., 2009), where the mouth movements an individual sees can alter what they believe to “hear” a speaker to be saying (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976), despite preserved unisensory abilities (Ross et al., 2007).

Impaired sensory integration is a hallmark neurological “soft sign” of SCZ (Heinrichs and Buchanan, 1988) that is often noted at the time of an individual's first psychotic episode and is correlated with SCZ symptomatology (Williams et al., 2010). Most germane to this report is the possible link between alterations in sensory integration and positive symptoms in SCZ, most notably hallucinations (Postmes et al., 2014). Exploring an integration-hallucination link is motivated by the overlap in the neural substrates for audiovisual integration and hallucinations, specifically in regions of the audiovisual speech-perception network. For example, SCZ is associated with structural (Kim et al., 2003) and functional changes within the superior temporal cortex (Surguladze et al., 2001, Szycik et al., 2009). This same area of cortex is heavily implicated in multisensory temporal processing (Stevenson et al., 2010). Furthermore, individuals with SCZ exhibit alterations in temporal processing (Carroll et al., 2008, Davalos et al., 2002, Elvevag et al., 2003, Foucher et al., 2007, Freedman, 1974, Giersch et al., 2009, Lalanne et al., 2012, Tysk, 1983a, Tysk, 1983b, Volz et al., 2001), and impaired audiovisual temporal precision in SCZ has been linked to inaccurately attributing auditory components of speech to temporally disparate visual speech signals (Martin et al., 2013).

Given the relationship between temporal processing and sensory integration (Stevenson et al., 2012b), and links between sensory integration and hallucination in SCZ, we hypothesize that impaired temporal perception in SCZ may be associated with hallucinations in SCZ. To investigate this, we first measured auditory, visual, and multisensory temporal perception in SCZ patients and a group of matched controls, verifying the presence of temporal dysfunction in SCZ and assessing if temporal-perception deficits were uniquely multisensory. Second, and of paramount importance, we measured the severity of hallucinations in SCZ participants with the a priori prediction that changes in multisensory temporal processing would be predictive of hallucinations. This finding would point to shared mechanistic substrates for changes in audiovisual temporal integration and the presence and severity of hallucinations.

Section snippets

Overview

Participants completed four behavioral tasks: two unisensory timing tasks in which participants performed temporal order judgments (TOJ; “Which came first?”) with either auditory or visual stimuli, and two audiovisual timing tasks in which participants performed audiovisual simultaneity judgments (SJ; “Same time or different time?”), one with speech stimuli and one with simple flash-beep stimuli. Finally, participants completed standard metrics assessing SCZ symptomatology. Protocols were

Unisensory temporal perception

Auditory temporal perception was indexed via an auditory TOJ task. Responses were averaged for each SOA for each individual. A mixed linear model (MLM) was then used to measure the impact of SOA and diagnosis on response accuracy (Fig. 1A). In this 2-factor MLM, both factors of diagnosis (F(1,228.7) = 84.57, p < 0.001) and SOA (F(1,26.2) = 58.84, p < 0.001) significantly contributed, but the two did not interact (F(1,56.0) = 0.06, p < 0.81). To quantify this between-group difference, thresholds

Discussion

This study provides a novel view into the relationships between impaired temporal processing, multisensory integration, and hallucinations in SCZ. Three main findings are evident in the data. First, this study confirms that individuals with SCZ show decreased temporal acuity in both auditory and visual perception, as well as in audiovisual temporal perception. Second, SCZ participants exhibit impairments in multisensory temporal acuity that extend beyond these unisensory changes, suggesting a

Conclusions

Our results support the hypothesis that sensory disturbances, specifically those in the temporal processing realm, contribute to hallucinations in SCZ. SCZ is associated with auditory and visual temporal dysfunction, with additional multisensory temporal dysfunction beyond that predicted by these unisensory deficits. These audiovisual temporal perceptual disturbances are also significantly predictive of clinical measures of hallucination severity, supporting the hypothesis that hallucinations

Role of funding

Funding did not impact the outcome of this research in any way.

Contributions

This study was designed by authors RS, SP, CC, LM, and MW and conducted by RS, CC, and LM. Data were analyzed by RS and interpreted by RS, SP, MB, SF, and MW. The manuscript was drafted by RS, and edited and approved by all authors.

Financial disclosures

Dr. Stevenson reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Dr. Park reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Ms. Cochran reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Ms. McIntosh reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Mr. Noel reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Dr. Barense reported no biomedical financial

Acknowledgements

R.S. was funded by a Banting Fellowship from the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Counsel, the Autism Research Training Program funded by the Canadian Health Institutes of Health Research, and the National Institutes of Deafness and Communicative and Disorders (NIDCD 1F32 DC011993). S.P. was funded by grants from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders, and the National Institutes for Mental Health, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Endowment.

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