Sound-Induced Enhancement of Low-Intensity Vision: Multisensory Influences on Human Sensory-Specific Cortices and Thalamic Bodies Relate to Perceptual Enhancement of Visual Detection Sensitivity

By T. Noesselt, Sascha Tyll, Carsten Nicolas Boehler, Eike Budinger, Hans-Jochen Heinze, Jon Driver. 2010

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Combining information across modalities can affect sensory performance. We studied how co-occurring sounds modulate behavioral visual detection sensitivity (d′), and neural responses, for visual stimuli of higher or lower intensity. Co-occurrence of a sound enhanced human detection sensitivity for lower- but not higher-intensity visual targets. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) linked this to boosts in activity-levels for sensory-specific visual and auditory cortex, plus multisensory superior temporal sulcus (STS), specifically for a lower-intensity visual event when paired with a sound. Thalamic structures in visual and auditory pathways, the lateral and medial geniculate bodies, respectively (LGB, MGB), showed a similar pattern. Subject-by-subject psychophysical benefits correlated with corresponding fMRI signals in visual, auditory, and multisensory regions. We also analyzed differential “coupling” patterns of LGB and MGB with other regions in the different experimental conditions. Effective-connectivity analyses showed enhanced coupling of sensory-specific thalamic bodies with the affected cortical sites during enhanced detection of lower-intensity visual events paired with sounds. Coupling strength between visual and auditory thalamus with cortical regions, including STS, covaried parametrically with the psychophysical benefit for this specific multisensory context. Our results indicate that multisensory enhancement of detection sensitivity for low-contrast visual stimuli by co-occurring sounds reflects a brain network involving not only established multisensory STS and sensory-specific cortex but also visual and auditory thalamus.

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

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the Role of the ‘Unity Assumption’ on Multisensory Integration: A Review (2017, background): “Specifically, multisensory stimuli that are presented close in time or space may have been encoded and/or integrated during the feed-forward processing (i.e., in a bottom–up fashion, see Stein and Meredith, 1993; Noesselt et al., 2010; van Atteveldt et al., 2014).”
Multisensory Stimulation in Stroke Rehabilitation (2012, background): “Multisensory enhancement of detection sensitivity for low-contrast visual stimuli by sounds reflects a brain network involving not only established multisensory and sensoryspecific cortex but also visual and auditory thalamus (Noesselt et al., 2010).”
Eccentricity dependent auditory enhancement of visual stimulus detection but not discrimination (2013, background): “…2005; Ghazanfar and Schroeder, 2006), as suggested not only by psychophysical studies (Jaekl and Harris, 2009; Jaekl and Soto-Faraco, 2010) but also by functional imaging work (Giard and Peronnet, 1999; Molholm et al., 2002; Watkins et al., 2006; Noesselt et al., 2010; Werner and Noppeney, 2010).”
The Curious Incident of Attention in Multisensory Integration: Bottom-up vs. Top-down (2016, unknown): “Studies using simple, abstract stimuli have predominantly focused on determining stimulus-driven effects, such as their relative timing or location (Noesselt et al., 2010; Stein and Stanford, 2008; Van Wassenhove et al., 2007) or their relative intensity (Holmes, 2009; Rach et al.”
Looming Signals Reveal Synergistic Principles of Multisensory Integration (2012, background): “This further highlights the behavioral relevance of early-latency and low-level multisensory interactions in humans (Romei et al., 2007, 2009; Sperdin et al., 2009, 2010; Noesselt et al., 2010; Van der Burg et al., 2011) as well as monkeys (Wang et al., 2008).”
The multisensory function of the human primary visual cortex. (2016, background): “…reported increased coupling between auditory and primary visual cortices, particularly under conditions of synchronous stimulation across the senses (Lewis and Noppeney, 2010; Tyll et al., 2013), that may perhaps be mediated by thalamic circuits (Noesselt et al., 2010; Bonath et al., 2013).”