Testing the neural noise account: an investigation of visual temporal precision in Tourette syndrome

Abstract

AbstractTourette syndrome (TS) is a neurological disorder of childhood onset characterised by the occurrence of vocal and motor tics. The pathophysiology of TS has been linked to dysfunction within cortical-striatal-thalamic-cortical (CSTC) brain circuits and alterations in gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signalling within the striatum. Recently, it has been proposed that increased neural noise, leading to decreased signal-to-noise, may be responsible for dysfunctional information processing in TS. Importantly, increased neural noise could impact all stages of the sensorimotor processing, including sensation, action planning, and action execution, and it currently remains to be determined whether this ‘increased neural noise account’ of TS refers to all aspects of information processing, or is specific to particular stages of information processing. We hypothesised that if TS was associated with decreased signal-to-noise when processing visual stimuli, then this might be reflected in a reduction in the precision of their perceptual timing estimates. To examine this, we investigated the precision of perceptual timing in a group of individuals with tic disorder using a visual temporal-order-judgement (TOJ) task.