Cognitive Impairment in Multiple Sclerosis Is Reflected by Increased Susceptibility to the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion

Abstract

Objective: To determine whether the performance of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients in the sound-induced flash illusion (SiFi), a multisensory perceptual illusion, would reflect their cognitive impairment. Methods: We performed the SiFi task as well as an extensive neuropsychological testing in 95 subjects [39 patients with relapse-remitting MS (RRMS), 16 subjects with progressive multiple sclerosis (PMS) and 40 healthy control subjects (HC)]. Results: MS patients reported more frequently the multisensory SiFi than HC. In contrast, there were no group differences in the control conditions. Essentially, patients with progressive type of MS continued to perceive the illusion at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) that were more than three times longer than the SOA at which the illusion was already disrupted for healthy controls. Furthermore, MS patients' degree of cognitive impairment measured with a broad neuropsychological battery encompassing tests for memory, attention, executive functions, and fluency was predicted by their performance in the SiFi task for the longest SOA of 500 ms. Conclusions: These findings support the notion that MS patients exhibit an altered multisensory perception in the SiFi task and that their susceptibility to the perceptual illusion is negatively correlated with their neuropsychological test performance. Since MS lesions affect white matter tracts and cortical regions which seem to be involved in the transfer and processing of both crossmodal and cognitive information, this might be one possible explanation for our findings. SiFi might be considered as a brief, non-expensive, language- and education-independent screening test for cognitive deficits in MS patients.

What you see is what you hear: Twenty years of research using the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion

“…The SIFI has shed light on the nature and mechanisms of human multisensory perception as recently reviewed in Keil (2020). Perhaps due to the simple nature of the task, the paradigm has also been used to detect sensory processing differences across several clinical subgroups including autism (Foss-Feig et al, 2010;Kawakami et al, 2018;Keane et al, 2010;Stevenson et al, 2014;van Der Smagt et al, 2007), schizophrenia (Balz et al, 2016b;Ferri et al, 2018;Haß et al, 2017;Odegaard and Shams, 2017;Vanes et al, 2016), migraine (Brighina et al, 2015(Brighina et al, , 2014Di Marco et al, 2015;Maccora et al, 2019), mild cognitive impairment (Chan et al, 2015), multiple sclerosis (Yalachkov et al, 2019), fall-prone older adults (Setti et al, , 2011Stapleton et al, 2014), hemispatial neglect (Bolognini et al, 2016), amblyopia (Narinesingh et al, 2017), monocular enucleation (Moro and Steeves, 2018) and hearing aid users (Gieseler et al, 2018).…”

“…Several other lines of evidence support SIFI as a marker of cognitive function in ageing and clinical subgroups. For example older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remain susceptible to the SIFI at longer SOAs (Chan et al, 2015), increasing cognitive load in young adults increases SIFI susceptibility (Michail and Keil, 2018) and SIFI susceptibility correlates with cognitive impairment and memory capacity in patients with Multiple Sclerosis (Yalachkov et al, 2019).…”

Patients with chronic autoimmune demyelinating polyneuropathies exhibit cognitive deficits which might be associated with CSF evidence of blood-brain barrier disturbance

“…To further corroborate our findings from comparing the patients' performance with the respective reference means in the neuropsychological tests, we conducted an additional analysis, where we compared patients' performance directly with the performance of healthy controls. The data of the HC control group has been analysed in a previous study of our group [11] with a different focus and patient population, and should serve here only as part of the further analysis of the CADP population.…”

Lebensqualität, kognitive Leistung und multisensorische Integrationsleistung bei NMOSD Patienten

“…Neuropathie (MADSAM) durchgeführt. 58,118,119 Es gibt verschiedene Ansätze und Grenzen, Kohorten in kognitiv beeinträchtigt und kognitiv intakt einzuteilen. In der Literatur werden teilweise auch drei Gruppen erstellt mit einer Zwischengruppe, welche leichte kognitive Defizite aufweist.…”