Multisensory integration in macaque visual cortex depends on cue reliability

By Michael L. Morgan, Gregory C. DeAngelis, Dora E. Angelaki. 2008

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Responses of multisensory neurons to combinations of sensory cues are generally enhanced or depressed relative to single cues presented alone. We examined integration of visual and vestibular self-motion cues in area MSTd. We presented unimodal as well as congruent and conflicting bimodal stimuli across a full range of headings in the horizontal plane. This broad exploration of stimulus space permitted evaluation of hypothetical combination rules employed by multisensory neurons. Bimodal responses were well fit by weighted linear sums of unimodal responses, with weights typically less than one (sub-additive). Importantly, weights change with the relative reliabilities of the two cues: visual weights decrease and vestibular weights increase when visual stimuli are degraded. Moreover, both modulation depth and neuronal discrimination thresholds improve for matched bimodal as compared to unimodal stimuli, which might allow for increased neural sensitivity during multisensory stimulation. These findings establish important new constraints for neural models of cue integration.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Normalization as a canonical neural computation (2011, background): “Normalization thus explains why neurons that integrate sensory inputs from different modalities weigh each modality depending on its strengt”
Mental imagery of speech: linking motor and perceptual systems through internal simulation and estimation (2012, background): “Analogous to the advantage of multisensory integration in minimizing perceptual variance (Ernst and Banks, 2002; Alais and Burr, 2004; van Wassenhove et al., 2005; von Kriegstein and Giraud, 2006; Morgan et al., 2008; Poeppel et al., 2008; Fetsch et al., 2009), the modulatory effects of motor simula”
Multisensory integration: flexible use of general operations (2014, unknown): “We illustrate this proposition by unifying recent findings from different research themes such as timing, behavioral goal, and experience-related differences in integration.”
Sensory reliability shapes perceptual inference via two mechanisms. (2015, methodology): “The model fit was assessed by the coefficient of determination (Nagelkerke, 1991).”
A Normalization Model of Multisensory Integration (2011, unknown): “The intensity of the vestibular cue was kept constant, while the intensity of the visual cue varied to simulate the manipulation of motion coherence used in MSTd 11 .”