Abstract
Research has established decreased sensory habituation as a defining feature in migraine, while decreased cognitive habituation has only been found with regard to cognitive assessment of the relative probability of the occurrence of a stimulus event. Our study extended the investigation of interictal habituation in migraine to include cognitive processing when viewing of a series of visually-complex images, similar to those we encounter on the internet everyday. We examined interictal neurocognitive function in migraine from a habituation perspective, using a novel paradigm designed to assess how the response to a series of images changes over time. Two groups of participants--migraineurs (N = 25) and non-migraine controls (N = 25)--were asked to view a set of 232 unfamiliar logos in the context of a target identification task as their brain electrical responses were recorded via event-related potentials (ERPs). The set of logos was viewed serially in each of 10 separate trial blocks, with data analysis focusing on how the ERP responses to the logos in frontal electrodes from 200-600 ms changed across time within each group. For the controls, we found that the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) ERP component elicited by the logos had no significant change across trial blocks. In contrast, in migraineurs we found that the LPP significantly increased in amplitude across trial blocks, an effect consistent with a lack of habituation to visual stimuli seen in previous research. Our findings provide empirical support abnormal cognitive processing of complex visual images across time in migraineurs that goes beyond the sensory-level habituation found in previous research.
Highlights
Migraine is a primary headache disorder which is strongly associated with dysfunction of neuronal cortical excitability in between headache attacks [1]
The goal of our study was to investigate whether interictal habituation deficits in migraine extend beyond the quantitative analysis of event probabilities to cognitive processing when viewing of a series of more visually-complex images, similar to those we encounter on the internet everyday
Our analysis focused on two issues: (1) Could we replicate this neurocognitive habituation effect in a set of non-migraine controls, and (2) Would migraineurs show an absence of this habituation effect, and instead manifest an increase in late positive potential (LPP) amplitude across trial blocks, similar to results found in other habituation studies of migraine? If so, this research will be a natural extension to the vast literature showing that migraineurs have decreased habituation of visualevoked potentials and event-related probabilities to encompass cognitive processing of complex visual images
Summary
Migraine is a primary headache disorder which is strongly associated with dysfunction of neuronal cortical excitability in between headache attacks [1]. Strong evidence for this dysfunction includes heightened visual sensitivity between migraine attacks [1,3,4,5,6,7], and interictal deficits in sensory habituation to repetitive stimuli, as revealed by EEG-based measures of evoked cortical responses [8]. The authors suggest that the inconsistent findings may be due to cognitive impairments only being in a subset of migraineurs [18] While this is a possibility, it may be that the inconsistent findings are due to a disconnect between the known abnormaliies in interictal sensory processing (ie, visual sensivities and lack of sensory habituation) and what neuropsychological assessments have typically targeted for study--broad cognitive assessments of verbal and memory abilities, motor and visuospatial skills, reasoning, and executive control functions [18]. It makes sense to look for cognitive abnormalities that target cognitive processing that would likely to be impacted by hyperexcitable visual cortices
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