Altered multisensory temporal integration in obesity.
Eating is a multisensory behavior. The act of placing food in the mouth provides us with a variety of sensory information, including gustatory, olfactory, somatosensory, visual, and auditory. Evidence suggests altered eating behavior in obesity. Nonetheless, multisensory integration in obesity has been scantily investigated so far. Starting from this gap in the literature, we seek to provide the first comprehensive investigation of multisensory integration in obesity. Twenty male obese participants and twenty male healthy-weight participants took part in the study aimed at describing the multisensory temporal binding window (TBW). The TBW is defined as the range of stimulus onset asynchrony in which multiple sensory inputs have a high probability of being integrated. To investigate possible multisensory temporal processing deficits in obesity, we investigated performance in two multisensory audiovisual temporal tasks, namely simultaneity judgment and temporal order judgment. Results showed a wider TBW in obese participants as compared to healthy-weight controls. This holds true for both the simultaneity judgment and the temporal order judgment tasks. An explanatory hypothesis would regard the effect of metabolic alterations and low-grade inflammatory state, clinically observed in obesity, on the temporal organization of brain ongoing activity, which one of the neural mechanisms enabling multisensory integration.
"Rita Levi Montalcini" Department of Neuroscience, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.|I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Auxologico Italiano Ospedale San Giuseppe, Piancavallo, Italy.
Federica
F
Scarpina
Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. d'Annunzio, Chieti, Italy.
Daniele
D
Migliorati
I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Auxologico Italiano Ospedale San Giuseppe, Piancavallo, Italy.|Department of Translational Medicine, Università del Piemonte Orientale 'A. Avogadro', Novara, Italy.
Paolo
P
Marzullo
"Rita Levi Montalcini" Department of Neuroscience, University of Turin, Turin, Italy.|I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Auxologico Italiano Ospedale San Giuseppe, Piancavallo, Italy.
Alessandro
A
Mauro
I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Auxologico Italiano Ospedale San Giuseppe, Piancavallo, Italy.|Department of Clinical Sciences and Community Health, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Massimo
M
Scacchi
Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. d'Annunzio, Chieti, Italy.|Centre for Brain Science, Department of Psychology, University of Essex, UK.
Marcello
M
Costantini
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D015992:Body Mass Index; D001835:Body Weight; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009765:Obesity / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013998:Time Perception; D014796:Visual Perception