Brain Advance Access published online on October 11, 2005
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awh656
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1 Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Bologna, Italy; CsrNC, Centro di studi e ricerche in Neuroscienze Cognitive, Cesena, Italy
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. One of the most effective techniques in the rehabilitation of visual field defects is based on implementation of oculomotor strategies to compensate for visual field loss. In the present study we develop a new rehabilitation approach based on the audio-visual stimulation of the visual field. Since it has been demonstrated that audio-visual interaction in multisensory neurons can improve temporally visual perception in patients with hemianopia, the aim of the present study was to verify whether a systematic audio-visual stimulation might induce a long-lasting amelioration of visual field disorders. Eight patients with chronic visual field defects were trained to detect the presence of visual targets. During the training, the visual stimulus could be presented alone, i.e. unimodal condition, or together with an acoustic stimulus, i.e. crossmodal conditions. In the crossmodal conditions, the spatial disparity between the visual and the acoustic stimuli were systematically varied (0, 16 and 32° of disparity). Furthermore, the temporal interval between the acoustic stimulus and the visual target in the crossmodal conditions was gradually reduced from 500 to 0 ms. Patients underwent the treatment for 4 h daily, over a period of nearly 2 weeks. The results showed a progressive improvement of visual detections during the training and an improvement of visual oculomotor exploration that allowed patients to efficiently compensate for the loss of vision. More interesting, there was a transfer of treatment gains to functional measures assessing visual field exploration and to daily-life activities, which was found stable at the 1 month follow-up control session. These findings are very promising with respect to the possibility of taking advantage of human multisensory capabilities to recover from unimodal sensory impairments.
Received June 17, 2005
Revised August 30, 2005
Accepted September 2, 2005
Article
Visual search improvement in hemianopic patients after audio-visual stimulation
2 CsrNC, Centro di studi e ricerche in Neuroscienze Cognitive, Cesena, Italy; Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Ospedale Bufalini, Cesena, Italy
3 Clinica di Neuroriabilitazione, Azienda Ospedali Riuniti Lancisi-Salesi- Umberto I, Ancona, Italy
Elisabetta Làdavas, E-mail: elisabetta.ladavas{at}unibo.it
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