Abnormal multisensory temporal discrimination in Parkinson’s disease

Cognitive deficits are prevalent in Parkinson’s disease (PD), ranging from mild deficits in perception and executive function to severe dementia. Multisensory integration (MSI), the ability to pool information from different sensory modalities to form a combined, coherent perception of the environment, is known to be impaired in PD. This study investigated the disruption of audiovisual MSI in PD patients by evaluating temporal discrimination ability between auditory and visual stimuli with different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). The experiment was conducted with Fifteen PD patients and fifteen age-matched healthy controls where participants were requested to report whether the audiovisual stimuli pairs were temporal simultaneous. The temporal binding window (TBW), the time during which sensory modalities are perceived as synchronous, was adapted as the comparison index between PD patients and healthy individuals. Our results showed that PD patients had a significantly wider TBW than healthy controls, indicating abnormal audiovisual temporal discrimination. Furthermore, PD patients had more difficulty in discriminating temporal asynchrony in visual-first, but not in auditory-first stimuli, compared to healthy controls. In contrast, no significant difference was observed for auditory-first stimuli. PD patients also had shorter reaction times than healthy controls regardless of stimulus priority. Together, our findings point to abnormal audiovisual temporal discrimination, a major component of MSI irregularity, in PD patients. These results have important implications for future models of MSI experiments and models that aim to uncover the underlying mechanism of MSI in patients afflicted with PD.