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Intact sensorimotor rhythm abilities but altered audiovisual integration in cochlear implant users
Olivier Valentin1,2,3, Nicholas Elgin Vernam Foster2, Bastien Intartaglia2,3,4,5
1School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Plos One
|April 2, 2025
Summary
Cochlear implant (CI) users maintain auditory rhythm synchronization skills comparable to hearing controls, but unlike deaf individuals, they do not show an enhanced visual rhythm synchronization advantage.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Auditory Neuroscience
- Sensory Integration
Background:
- Rhythm perception is crucial for music, speech, and motor coordination.
- Hearing individuals synchronize better to auditory than visual rhythms.
- Deaf individuals exhibit enhanced visual synchronization, a trait not fully retained by cochlear implant (CI) users.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether CI users retain a visual synchronization advantage from pre-implantation deafness.
- To determine if post-implantation neural reorganization impacts multisensory integration.
- To compare auditory and visual rhythm synchronization in CI users versus hearing controls (HC).
Main Methods:
- A sensorimotor synchronization task using finger tapping.
- Four stimulus conditions: auditory metronome, visual metronome, synchronous audio-visual, and asynchronous audio-visual.
- Comparison of synchronization consistency and multisensory integration between CI users and HC.
Main Results:
- Both CI users and HC synchronized better to auditory than visual stimuli.
- Unisensory synchronization consistency was similar between CI users and HC.
- CI users, unlike HC, did not improve visual synchronization in the synchronous audio-visual condition.
Conclusions:
- Rhythm processing is relatively spared in CI users, with auditory synchronization skills comparable to HC.
- CI users do not exhibit a visual synchronization advantage, possibly due to limited pre-implantation deafness duration or post-implantation neural changes.
- Altered audio-visual integration in CI users suggests post-implantation cortical reorganization may affect temporal auditory-visual information processing.
