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Passive auditory stimulation improves vision in hemianopia

Lewald, J.; Tegenthoff, M.; Peters, S.; Hausmann, M.

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Authors

J. Lewald

M. Tegenthoff

S. Peters



Abstract

Techniques employed in rehabilitation of visual field disorders such as hemianopia are usually based on either visual or audio-visual stimulation and patients have to perform a training task. Here we present results from a completely different, novel approach that was based on passive unimodal auditory stimulation. Ten patients with either left or right-sided pure hemianopia (without neglect) received one hour of unilateral passive auditory stimulation on either their anopic or their intact side by application of repetitive trains of sound pulses emitted simultaneously via two loudspeakers. Immediately before and after passive auditory stimulation as well as after a period of recovery, patients completed a simple visual task requiring detection of light flashes presented along the horizontal plane in total darkness. The results showed that one-time passive auditory stimulation on the side of the blind, but not of the intact, hemifield of patients with hemianopia induced an improvement in visual detections by almost 100% within 30 min after passive auditory stimulation. This enhancement in performance was reversible and was reduced to baseline 1.5 h later. A non-significant trend of a shift of the visual field border toward the blind hemifield was obtained after passive auditory stimulation. These results are compatible with the view that passive auditory stimulation elicited some activation of the residual visual pathways, which are known to be multisensory and may also be sensitive to unimodal auditory stimuli as were used here.

Citation

Lewald, J., Tegenthoff, M., Peters, S., & Hausmann, M. (2012). Passive auditory stimulation improves vision in hemianopia. PLoS ONE, 7(5), Article e31603. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0031603

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date May 29, 2012
Deposit Date Jan 12, 2012
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal PLoS ONE
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 7
Issue 5
Article Number e31603
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0031603

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Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2012 Lewald et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.





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