Auditory processing in schizophrenia: Behavioural evidence of abnormal spatial awareness

ABSTRACT

Spatial processing deficits are the reason for many daily life problems of schizophrenia (SCZ) patients. In this study, we aimed to examine the possibility of abnormal bias to one hemifield, in form of hemispatial neglect and extinction, in auditory modality in SCZ. Twenty-five SCZ patients and 25 healthy individuals were compared on speech tasks to study the auditory neglect and extinction, as well as an auditory localization task for studying neglect. In the speech tasks, participants reproduced some nonsense syllables, played from one or two speakers on the right and/or left sides. On the localization task, examinees discriminated the subjective location of the noise stimuli presented randomly from five speakers. On the speech task, patients had significantly lower hit rates for the right ear compared with controls (p = 0.01). While healthy controls showed right ear advantage, SCZs showed a left ear priority. In the localization task, although both groups had a left-side bias, this bias was much more prominent for the patients (all p < 0.05). SCZ could potentially alter the auditory spatial function, which may appear in the form of auditory neglect and extinction on the right side, depending on the characteristics of patient population.

KEYWORDS:

• Auditory
• laterality
• spatial
• localization
• schizophrenia

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Professor Leon Deouellwho kindly helped us in selecting the tasks and designing the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Author contributions

A. M. P. designed the tasks; S. M. designed the study and revised the manuscript; S. S collected the data and drafted the manuscript; and M. F. helped in finding the participants and writing the manuscript. All the authors read the manuscript and approved it.

Data availability statement

All of the raw data related with this work were generated at Kerman Neuroscience Research Center. Derived data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (Ali Mohammad Pourrahimi) on request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Neuroscience Research Center, Kerman University of Medical Science, Kerman, Iran [grant number 4-92].