Neural basis of the ventriloquist illusion.
Curr Biol
; 17(19): 1697-703, 2007 Oct 09.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-17884498
ABSTRACT
The ventriloquist creates the illusion that his or her voice emerges from the visibly moving mouth of the puppet [1]. This well-known illusion exemplifies a basic principle of how auditory and visual information is integrated in the brain to form a unified multimodal percept. When auditory and visual stimuli occur simultaneously at different locations, the more spatially precise visual information dominates the perceived location of the multimodal event. Previous studies have examined neural interactions between spatially disparate auditory and visual stimuli [2-5], but none has found evidence for a visual influence on the auditory cortex that could be directly linked to the illusion of a shifted auditory percept. Here we utilized event-related brain potentials combined with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate on a trial-by-trial basis that a precisely timed biasing of the left-right balance of auditory cortex activity by the discrepant visual input underlies the ventriloquist illusion. This cortical biasing may reflect a fundamental mechanism for integrating the auditory and visual components of environmental events, which ensures that the sounds are adaptively localized to the more reliable position provided by the visual input.
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Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Ilusões Ópticas
/
Jogos e Brinquedos
/
Percepção Auditiva
/
Percepção Visual
/
Neurônios
Limite:
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Curr Biol
Assunto da revista:
BIOLOGIA
Ano de publicação:
2007
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Estados Unidos