UC Santa Cruz

Misophonia, a condition marked by decreased tolerance to everyday sounds such as chewing or slurping, can cause severe impairment in social and private settings. The present study examined whether the temporal binding window (TBW) differs between individuals with misophonia and controls for simple flash-beep, complex trigger, and complex neutral stimuli. We measured participants’ TBWs using a simultaneity judgment task(SJ) with simple, trigger, and neutral audiovisual stimuli. Our findings showed that the overall width of TBW varied as a function of stimulus complexity in both groups, with trigger stimuli having the widest TBW, followed by neutral stimuli. Our results also showed that the right TBW was significantly narrower for the trigger PAVS stimuli in the misophonia group, suggesting more temporal precision for misophonics when the video preceded the trigger sound. We also report a novel finding that the benefit of PAVS stimuli is maximal when they are synchronized compared to when the trigger precedes the video or vice versa. An unexpected finding was that misophoics were less susceptible to the McGurk illusion. Overall, this study addressed a novel theoretical question regarding the temporal constraint of multisensory processing of simple, neutral, and trigger stimuli in misophonia.