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ABSTRACT
Introduction: Schizophrenia has been characterised by neurodevelopmental dysconnectivity resulting in cognitive and perceptual dysmetria. Hence patients with schizophrenia may be impaired to detect the temporal relationship between stimuli in different sensory modalities. However, only a few studies described deficit in perception of temporally asynchronous multisensory stimuli in schizophrenia.
Methods: We examined the perceptual bias and the processing time of synchronous and delayed sounds in the streaming–bouncing illusion in 16 patients with schizophrenia and a matched control group of 18 participants.
Results: Equal for patients and controls, the synchronous sound biased the percept of two moving squares towards bouncing as opposed to the more frequent streaming percept in the condition without sound. In healthy controls, a delay of the sound presentation significantly reduced the bias and led to prolonged processing time whereas patients with schizophrenia did not differentiate between this condition and the condition with synchronous sound.
Conclusion: Schizophrenia leads to a prolonged window of simultaneity for audiovisual stimuli. Therefore, temporal processing deficit in schizophrenia can lead to hyperintegration of temporally unmatched multisensory stimuli.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Andrey Nikolaev from Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium for helpful discussion, the Brain Imaging Facility of IZKF Aachen (RWTH Aachen University) for technical support and Halim Baqapuri for helpful suggestions. We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.