Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson’s disease changes perception in the Rubber Hand Illusion

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) alters cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic circuitry and susceptibility to an illusion of bodily awareness, the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI). Bodily awareness is thought to result from multisensory integration in a predominantly cortical network; the role of subcortical connections is unknown. We studied the effect of modulating cortico-subcortical circuitry on multisensory integration for bodily awareness in PD patients treated with peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/231340 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) using the RHI experiment.Typically, synchronous visuo-tactile cues induce a false perception of touch on the rubber hand as if it were the subject's hand, whereas asynchronous visuo-tactile cues do not.However, we found that in the asynchronous condition, patients in the off-stimulation state did not reject the RHI as strongly as healthy controls; switching on STN-DBS partially 'normalised' their responses. Patients in the off-stimulation state also misjudged the position of their hand, indicating it to be closer to the rubber hand than controls. However, STN-DBS did not affect proprioceptive judgements or subsequent arm movements altered by the perceptual effects of the illusion. Our findings support the idea that the STN and subcortical connections have a key role in multisensory integration for bodily awareness. Decisionmaking in multisensory bodily illusions is discussed.

Subthalamic and Pallidal Stimulations in Patients with Parkinson's Disease: Common and Dissociable Connections

“…2,46,47 The functional connectivity between the somatomotor network and visual network is associated with multimodal integration. 48,49 This connectivity decreased under STN-DBS but not GPi-DBS, which suggests multimodal integration may be selectively affected by STN-DBS. Further studies are needed to associate the differentiated alterations in connectivity with particular differences in clinical effects besides the UPDRS-III scores (eg, antidyskinesia effect, gait, speech, swallowing, mood, and cognitive functions) of DBS at the 2 target sites.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on Individual Differences in Multisensory Perception: an Overview

“…In addition to the neurological conditions outlined above, multisensory perception is now being explored as a feature of a number of physiological conditions such as visual field defects and unilateral spatial neglect (Bolognini et al, 2016), Parkinson's disease (Ding et al, 2017), functional movement disorders (Marotta et al, 2017), and stroke (White and Aimola Davies, 2017). The most highly-investigated physiological conditions are blindness and deafness, and in this special issue Arnold, Pesnot-Lerousseau and Auvray review how individual capacities impact the ability to use assistive technology for the visually impaired.…”