Tinnitus: Psychological and Neurophysiological Correlates of Phantom Auditory Perception – GHOSTTONE

The GHOSTTONE project aims to explore the cognitive features and neurophysiological markers of tinnitus, a phantom auditory perception often associated with hearing loss. Affecting 14% of the population, this condition can lead to significant emotional and cognitive disorders. As there is no cure for tinnitus, only palliative interventions to reduce the associated distress, it is essential to understand the mechanisms underlying tinnitus in order to develop preventive measures and innovative therapeutic interventions. The GhostTone project seeks to understand why some people with hearing loss develop tinnitus and why this phantom percept remains stable and chronic overtime in some of them. It aims at advancing knowledge about the cognitive aspects and the electrophysiological markers associated with tinnitus focusing on 3 main objectives to (1) characterize the predictive errors in perception and their electrophysiological markers, (2) assess the predictions and their cerebral correlates in naturalistic stimuli to better characterize how this drives patients with tinnitus’s day-to-day experience and (3) clarify the habituation, salience and attentional bias, as well as their neural signature associated with chronic tinnitus perception. This project is structured in 3 Work Packages (WPs), to assess the difference in cognitive functioning and electrophysiological responses with tinnitus presence. WP1 and WP2 test the hypothesis that the generation of tinnitus is linked to prediction errors in auditory perception, with WP 1 focusing on the behavioral assessment of perceptual illusions using psychophysics paradigms, and WP 2 using natural situation and testing the neural correlates. The WP 3 tests the hypothesis that the persistence of tinnitus over time is associated to a lack of sensory habituation because of an oversensitivity of the salience network and of the exogenous attention to sounds, using behavioral responses and their neural correlates. The originality of the interdisciplinary and translational approach, at the crossroads of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, audiology and computational modeling, is to test hypotheses that are grounded in a solid theoretical framework, and which have not yet been validated in the presence of phantom auditory perception. For this purpose, we will use rigorous, and cutting-edge behavioral and neuroimaging measures, that have never been used in tinnitus studies, to demonstrate the neurocognitive correlates of tinnitus. The combination of three research teams with different and complementary expertise in cognitive neuroscience and the clinical expertise of an ENT specialist in charge of a tinnitus clinic, all involved in the reConnect Institut Hospital-universitaire (IHU), attests to the feasibility and the innovative nature of the project. It has the potential to establish a solid scientific foundation for understanding tinnitus pathophysiology and to identify behavioral and/or electrophysiological markers of tinnitus perception and persistence—an essential first step toward developing therapies that specifically target its neurocognitive aspects. Therefore, a comprehensive investigation of the cognitive phenotypes associated with tinnitus, along with their physiological counterparts, represents a critical step toward understanding—and ultimately curing—this complex auditory disorder.