Magnetoencephalography recordings reveal the neural mechanisms of auditory contributions to improved visual detection.

Sounds enhance the detection of visual stimuli while concurrently biasing an observer's decisions. To investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie such multisensory interactions, we decoded time-resolved Signal Detection Theory sensitivity and criterion parameters from magneto-encephalographic recordings of participants that performed a visual detection task. We found that sounds improved visual detection sensitivity by enhancing the accumulation and maintenance of perceptual evidence over time. Meanwhile, criterion decoding analyses revealed that sounds induced brain activity patterns that resembled the patterns evoked by an actual visual stimulus. These two complementary mechanisms of audiovisual interplay differed in terms of their automaticity: Whereas the sound-induced enhancement in visual sensitivity depended on participants being actively engaged in a detection task, we found that sounds activated the visual cortex irrespective of task demands, potentially inducing visual illusory percepts. These results challenge the classical assumption that sound-induced increases in false alarms exclusively correspond to decision-level biases.

Auditory Frequency Representations in Human Somatosensory Cortex.

Recent studies have challenged the traditional notion of modality-dedicated cortical systems by showing that audition and touch evoke responses in the same sensory brain regions. While much of this work has focused on somatosensory responses in auditory regions, fewer studies have investigated sound responses and representations in somatosensory regions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we measured BOLD signal changes in participants performing an auditory frequency discrimination task and characterized activation patterns related to stimulus frequency using both univariate and multivariate analysis approaches. Outside of bilateral temporal lobe regions, we observed robust and frequency-specific responses to auditory stimulation in classically defined somatosensory areas. Moreover, using representational similarity analysis to define the relationships between multi-voxel activation patterns for all sound pairs, we found clear similarity patterns for auditory responses in the parietal lobe that correlated significantly with perceptual similarity judgments. Our results demonstrate that auditory frequency representations can be distributed over brain regions traditionally considered to be dedicated to somatosensation. The broad distribution of auditory and tactile responses over parietal and temporal regions reveals a number of candidate brain areas that could support general temporal frequency processing and mediate the extensive and robust perceptual interactions between audition and touch.

Auditory adaptation improves tactile frequency perception.

Our ability to process temporal frequency information by touch underlies our capacity to perceive and discriminate surface textures. Auditory signals, which also provide extensive temporal frequency information, can systematically alter the perception of vibrations on the hand. How auditory signals shape tactile processing is unclear; perceptual interactions between contemporaneous sounds and vibrations are consistent with multiple neural mechanisms. Here we used a crossmodal adaptation paradigm, which separated auditory and tactile stimulation in time, to test the hypothesis that tactile frequency perception depends on neural circuits that also process auditory frequency. We reasoned that auditory adaptation effects would transfer to touch only if signals from both senses converge on common representations. We found that auditory adaptation can improve tactile frequency discrimination thresholds. This occurred only when adaptor and test frequencies overlapped. In contrast, auditory adaptation did not influence tactile intensity judgments. Thus auditory adaptation enhances touch in a frequency- and feature-specific manner. A simple network model in which tactile frequency information is decoded from sensory neurons that are susceptible to auditory adaptation recapitulates these behavioral results. Our results imply that the neural circuits supporting tactile frequency perception also process auditory signals. This finding is consistent with the notion of supramodal operators performing canonical operations, like temporal frequency processing, regardless of input modality.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Auditory signals can influence the tactile perception of temporal frequency. Multiple neural mechanisms could account for the perceptual interactions between contemporaneous auditory and tactile signals. Using a crossmodal adaptation paradigm, we found that auditory adaptation causes frequency- and feature-specific improvements in tactile perception. This crossmodal transfer of aftereffects between audition and touch implies that tactile frequency perception relies on neural circuits that also process auditory frequency.

On the 'visual' in 'audio-visual integration': a hypothesis concerning visual pathways.

Crossmodal interaction conferring enhancement in sensory processing is nowadays widely accepted. Such benefit is often exemplified by neural response amplification reported in physiological studies conducted with animals, which parallel behavioural demonstrations of sound-driven improvement in visual tasks in humans. Yet, a good deal of controversy still surrounds the nature and interpretation of these human psychophysical studies. Here, we consider the interpretation of crossmodal enhancement findings under the light of the functional as well as anatomical specialization of magno- and parvocellular visual pathways, whose paramount relevance has been well established in visual research but often overlooked in crossmodal research. We contend that a more explicit consideration of this important visual division may resolve some current controversies and help optimize the design of future crossmodal research.

Sound-driven enhancement of vision: disentangling detection-level from decision-level contributions.

Cross-modal enhancement can be mediated both by higher-order effects due to attention and decision making and by detection-level stimulus-driven interactions. However, the contribution of each of these sources to behavioral improvements has not been conclusively determined and quantified separately. Here, we apply psychophysical analysis based on Piéron functions in order to separate stimulus-dependent changes from those accounted by decision-level contributions. Participants performed a simple visual speeded detection task on Gabor patches of different spatial frequencies and contrast values, presented with and without accompanying sounds. On one hand, we identified an additive cross-modal improvement in mean reaction times across all types of visual stimuli that would be well explained by interactions not strictly based on stimulus-driven modulations (e.g., due to reduction of temporal uncertainty and motor times). On the other hand, we singled out an audio-visual benefit that strongly depended on stimulus features such as frequency and contrast. This particular enhancement was selective to low-visual spatial frequency stimuli, optimized for magnocellular sensitivity. We therefore conclude that interactions at detection stages and at decisional processes in response selection that contribute to audio-visual enhancement can be separated online and express on partly different aspects of visual processing.