Strengths and weaknesses of multimodal processing in a group of adults with gliomas

The present study aimed to analyze the multimodal skills that would be spared, altered, or impaired by gliomas that slowly infiltrate various and diversely localized areas in the cerebral hemispheres. Ten patients and 60 healthy controls were evaluated using four multimodal processing paradigms across 11 tasks. Our objectives were as follows: (a) to describe the strengths and weaknesses of the glioma patients' multimodal processing performance after accounting for task specificity and their individual performances compared to those of the control group; (b) to determine the correlation between lesion localization and impairments; and (c) to identify the tasks that were most sensitive to tumor infiltration and plasticity limits. Our results show that patients as a whole were efficient at most tasks; however, the patients exhibited difficulties in the productive picture-naming task, the receptive verbal judgment task, and the visual/graphic portion of the dual-attention task. The individual case reports show that the difficulties were distributed across the patients and did not correlate with lesion localization and tumor type.