Laboratory of Physiology of Cognitive Processes
2009
  • Title:Visual influences on voice-selective neurons in the anterior superior-temporal plane
  • Authors:C. Perrodin; C. Kayser; N. K. Logothetis; C. I. Petkov
  • Title of Journal:10th International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF 2009)
  • Year:2009
  • DOI:
Abstract
For social interaction and survival primates rely heavily on vocal and facial communication signals from their conspecifics. To date many studies have evaluated the unisensory representations of either vocal or facial information in regions thought to be voice or face selective. Other studies have directly evaluated the multisensory interactions of voices and faces but have focused on posterior auditory regions closer to the primary auditory cortex. This work investigates multisensory interactions at the neuronal level in an auditory region in the anterior superior temporal plane, which contains one of the important regions for processing voice-related information. Extracellular recordings were obtained from the auditory cortex of macaque monkeys, targeting an anterior voice region that we have previously described with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). For stimulation we used movies of vocalizing monkeys and humans which we matched in their low-level auditory and visual features. These dynamic face and voice stimuli allowed us to evaluate how neurons responded to auditory, visual or audio-visual components of the stimuli. Our experiments also contained control conditions consisting of several mismatched audiovisual stimuli combinations, such as 1) a voice matched to a face from a different species, 2) adding a temporal delay in the visual component of the stimulus, or 3) using an acoustically manipulated voice with the original facial stimulus. Our neuronal recordings identified a clustered population of voiceselective sites in the anterior superior temporal plane, ~5 mm anterior to field RT. A significant visual influence of the dynamic faces on the corresponding (“matched”) vocalizations was observed in both