John J. Foxe1,2,3, Glenn R. Wylie3, Antı́gona Martı́nez3, Charles M. Schroeder1,3, Daniel C. Javitt4,3, David N. Guilfoyle5, Walter Ritter3, Micah M. Murray1,3
1‖Department of Neuroscience, and
2Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx 10461;
3The Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Cognitive Neuroscience and Schizophrenia Program, and
4Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, New York City, New York 10016
5Center for Advanced Brain Imaging, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg 10962;
Tóm tắt
Using high-field (3 Tesla) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we demonstrate that auditory and somatosensory inputs converge in a subregion of human auditory cortex along the superior temporal gyrus. Further, simultaneous stimulation in both sensory modalities resulted in activity exceeding that predicted by summing the responses to the unisensory inputs, thereby showing multisensory integration in this convergence region. Recently, intracranial recordings in macaque monkeys have shown similar auditory-somatosensory convergence in a subregion of auditory cortex directly caudomedial to primary auditory cortex (area CM). The multisensory region identified in the present investigation may be the human homologue of CM. Our finding of auditory-somatosensory convergence in early auditory cortices contributes to mounting evidence for multisensory integration early in the cortical processing hierarchy, in brain regions that were previously assumed to be unisensory.
