Cortical integration of multimodal object and spatial information; Sub-project: Psychophysical experiments with patients with occipital cortical lesions
Organizational Data
- DRKS-ID:
- DRKS00003577
- Recruitment Status:
- Recruiting complete, study complete
- Date of registration in DRKS:
- 2012-02-27
- Last update in DRKS:
- 2017-08-07
- Registration type:
- Retrospective
Acronym/abbreviation of the study
No Entry
URL of the study
No Entry
Brief summary in lay language
Patients who are blind in one half of their visual field benefit from hearing auditory stimuli on the affected side. After passively hearing tones for an hour, their perception of light stimuli in the blind half of their visual field improved significantly. Neural pathways that simultaneously process information from different senses may be responsible for this effect. To investigate the effectiveness of the auditory stimuli, the research team carried out a sight test before and after the acoustic stimulation. The task of the ten patients was to determine the position of light flashes in the healthy and in the blind field of vision. While performance was stable in the intact half of their field of vision, the number of correct answers in the blind half increased after the auditory stimulation. This effect lasted for 1.5 hours.
Brief summary in scientific language
Techniques employed in rehabilitation of visual field disorders such as hemianopia are usually based on either visual or audio-visual stimulation and patients have to perform a training task. Here we present results from a completely different, novel approach that was based on passive unimodal auditory stimulation. Ten patients with either left or right-sided pure hemianopia (without neglect) received one hour of unilateral passive auditory stimulation on either their anopic or their intact side by application of repetitive trains of sound pulses emitted simultaneously via two loudspeakers. Immediately before and after passive auditory stimulation as well as after a period of recovery, patients completed a simple visual task requiring detection of light flashes presented along the horizontal plane in total darkness. The results showed that one-time passive auditory stimulation on the side of the blind, but not of the intact, hemifield of patients with hemianopia induced an improvement in visual detections by almost 100% within 30 min after passive auditory stimulation. This enhancement in performance was reversible and was reduced to baseline 1.5 h later. A non-significant trend of a shift of the visual field border toward the blind hemifield was obtained after passive auditory stimulation. These results are compatible with the view that passive auditory stimulation elicited some activation of the residual visual pathways, which are known to be multisensory and may also be sensitive to unimodal auditory stimuli as were used here.
Health condition or problem studied
- ICD10:
- H53.4 - Visual field defects
- Healthy volunteers:
- No Entry
Interventions, Observational Groups
- Arm 1:
- Ten patients with either left or right-sided pure hemianopia (without neglect) received one hour of unilateral passive auditory stimulation on either their anopic or their intact side by application of repetitive trains of sound pulses emitted simultaneously via two loudspeakers. Immediately before and after passive auditory stimulation as well as after a period of recovery, patients completed a simple visual task requiring detection of light flashes presented from light-emitting diods along the horizontal plane in total darkness. The acoustic stimulus used consisted of band-pass-filtered frozen noise (lower cutoff frequency 2 kHz; upper cutoff frequency 11 kHz). Stimuli were trains of ten sound bursts. Each stimulus train had an overall duration of 960 ms; single sound bursts had a duration of 60 ms with triangular envelope (onset/offset time 30 ms) and were presented at a rate of 10 Hz. The stimulus trains were presented at a rate of one per 5 s (interstimulus interval 4.04 s). Stimuli were always emitted with incoherent waveforms simultaneously from two loudspeakers located 14° and 76° on the same side. Sound stimuli were presented at a sound-pressure level of 60 dB(A).
Endpoints
- Primary outcome:
- Psychophysical measurement of the frequency of correct responses to visual stimuli prior to and after repetitive passive auditory stimulation.
- Secondary outcome:
- -
Study Design
- Purpose:
- Basic research/physiological study
- Allocation:
- N/A (single arm study)
- Control:
-
- Uncontrolled/single arm
- Phase:
- N/A
- Study type:
- Interventional
- Mechanism of allocation concealment:
- No Entry
- Blinding:
- No
- Assignment:
- Single (group)
- Sequence generation:
- No Entry
- Who is blinded:
- No Entry
Recruitment
- Recruitment Status:
- Recruiting complete, study complete
- Reason if recruiting stopped or withdrawn:
- No Entry
Recruitment Locations
- Recruitment countries:
-
- Germany
- Number of study centers:
- Monocenter study
- Recruitment location(s):
-
- Other Universität Bochum
Recruitment period and number of participants
- Planned study start date:
- No Entry
- Actual study start date:
- 2005-06-12
- Planned study completion date:
- No Entry
- Actual Study Completion Date:
- 2011-07-02
- Target Sample Size:
- 10
- Final Sample Size:
- 10
Inclusion Criteria
- Sex:
- All
- Minimum Age:
- 18 Years
- Maximum Age:
- 70 Years
- Additional Inclusion Criteria:
- homonymous hemianopia
Exclusion Criteria
hearing impairments, neglect, other neurological disorders
Addresses
Primary Sponsor
- Address:
- Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Fakultät für PsychologiePD Dr. Jörg LewaldUniversitätsstr. 15044780 BochumGermany
- Telephone:
- No Entry
- Fax:
- No Entry
- Contact per E-Mail:
- Contact per E-Mail
- URL:
- No Entry
- Investigator Sponsored/Initiated Trial (IST/IIT):
- Yes
Contact for Scientific Queries
- Address:
- Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Fakultät für PsychologiePD Dr. Jörg LewaldUniversitätsstr. 15044780 BochumGermany
- Telephone:
- 02343225137
- Fax:
- No Entry
- Contact per E-Mail:
- Contact per E-Mail
- URL:
- http://www.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
Contact for Public Queries
- Address:
- Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Fakultät für PsychologiePD Dr. Jörg LewaldUniversitätsstr. 15044780 BochumGermany
- Telephone:
- 02343225137
- Fax:
- No Entry
- Contact per E-Mail:
- Contact per E-Mail
- URL:
- http://www.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
Principal Investigator
- Address:
- Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Fakultät für PsychologiePD Dr. Jörg LewaldUniversitätsstr. 15044780 BochumGermany
- Telephone:
- 02343225137
- Fax:
- No Entry
- Contact per E-Mail:
- Contact per E-Mail
- URL:
- http://www.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
Sources of Monetary or Material Support
Public funding institutions financed by tax money/Government funding body (German Research Foundation (DFG), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), etc.)
- Address:
- Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftKennedyallee 4053175 BonnGermany
- Telephone:
- No Entry
- Fax:
- No Entry
- Contact per E-Mail:
- Contact per E-Mail
- URL:
- http://www.dfg.de
Ethics Committee
Address Ethics Committee
- Address:
- Ethik-Kommission der Medizinischen Fakultät der Ruhr-Universität BochumGesundheitscampus 3344801 BochumGermany
- Telephone:
- +49-234-79816555
- Fax:
- +49-234-79816556
- Contact per E-Mail:
- Contact per E-Mail
- URL:
- No Entry
Vote of leading Ethics Committee
- Vote of leading Ethics Committee
- Date of ethics committee application:
- 2005-05-25
- Ethics committee number:
- 2551
- Vote of the Ethics Committee:
- Approved
- Date of the vote:
- 2005-06-08
Further identification numbers
- Other primary registry ID:
- No Entry
- EudraCT Number:
- No Entry
IPD - Individual Participant Data
- Do you plan to make participant-related data (IPD) available to other researchers in an anonymized form?:
- No Entry
- IPD Sharing Plan:
- No Entry
Study protocol and other study documents
- Study protocols:
- No Entry
- Study abstract:
- No Entry
- Other study documents:
- No Entry
- Background literature:
- No Entry
- Related DRKS studies:
- No Entry
Publication of study results
- Planned publication:
- No Entry
- Publikationen/Studienergebnisse:
- Lewald J, Tegenthoff M, Peters S, Hausmann M (2012) Passive Auditory Stimulation Improves Vision in Hemianopia. PLoS ONE 7(5): e31603. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031603
- Date of first publication of study results:
- No Entry
- DRKS entry published for the first time with results:
- No Entry
Basic reporting
- Basic Reporting / Results tables:
- No Entry
- Brief summary of results:
- No Entry