Perception, Not Response: The Causes of Abnormal Audiovisual Conflict in Parkinson's disease patients

Abstract

Audiovisual conflict control is an important cognitive function in humans. However, it was not clear whether and how abnormal audiovisual conflict control was reflected at periods of perception and response in the cognitive process in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. We recruited 27 PD patients and 22 healthy controls (HC) to complete audiovisual matching task to investigate the audiovisual conflict in PD patients at different processing periods and its relationship with cortical thickness. Behavioral results showed that abnormal audiovisual conflict at period of perception rather than response. The cortical thickness of left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) in PD patients was positively correlated with the sensory interference (visual interference > auditory interference) at period of perception. In addition, the results of support vector machines (SVM) showed revealed that models utilizing conflict at period of perception as a feature achieved higher predictive accuracy on the participant population, while those employing conflict at period of response as a feature did not. These finding suggested that perceptual conflict deficits in PD patients might be the causes of abnormal audiovisual conflict.