Time-Varying Electrophysiological Network Underlying Visual And Auditory Sensory Processing And Applications In Psychiatric Disorders

Schizophrenia has clinical symptoms of perceptual incoherence with the world,hallucinations,delusions,and out of the real environment.Multisensory integration is the key to the formation of a coherent perception of the world.Multisensory disintegration affecting this coherent perception has been demonstrated in schizophrenia.It has been found that patients with schizophrenia have audiovisual disintegration,especially when faces are presented with visual information.Schizophrenia showed face-related audiovisual disintegration.Face processing impairments has been demonstrated in schizophrenia,while no objects processing impairments.The aim of this paper is to investigate face-related audiovisual disintegration mechanism in schizophrenia and quantitative clinical index in diagnosis of schizophrenia.Previous studies have shown that audiovisual integration involves the information transmission and integration of multiple brain regions.We recruited healthy elder people and healthy young people,and conducted auditory and visual integration experiments to analyze the audio-visual integration mechanism.Apart from that,we recruited healthy adults and schizophrenia patients,and conducted face processing experiments to analyze face processing impairment in schizophrenia.This paper constructed the time-varying network based on phase lag index over trials and extracted the network topology based on graph theory.The results of audiovisual integration experiment showed that in Beta(14-30 Hz)frequency band,only presented by audiovisual stimuli,healthy elders showed significant increased brain connectivity and reduced small world property,compared with healthy adults,meaning that the elderly may spend more cognitive resources randomly to complete the audiovisual task.The results of face processing results found that in Gamma(30-45Hz)frequency,only presented by upright face stimuli underlying holistic processing,schizophrenia patients showed significantly decreased network connectivity and increased clustering coefficient,compared with healthy normal,meaning that schizophrenia showed facial holistic processing impairment.This paper investigated the mechanism of audiovisual integration and facial processing impairment in schizophrenic patients via time-varying brain network.This results increased insight into mechanisms underlying face-related audiovisual integration,identified the quantitative index to improve recognition of early psychosis,and extend the range of therapeutic possibilities.