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 be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2016-06, Vol.6 (1), p.28382-28382, Article 28382
Main Authors: Scarpina, Federica, Migliorati, Daniele, Marzullo, Paolo, Mauro, Alessandro, Scacchi, Massimo, Costantini, Marcello
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/2649/1723
631/477/2811
692/700/784
Body mass index
Eating behavior
Humanities and Social Sciences
Investigations
multidisciplinary
Neurosciences
Obesity
Physiology
Questionnaires
Science
Weight control
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep28382