Spatiotemporal architecture of cortical receptive fields and its impact on multisensory interactions

By David W. Royal, Brian N. Carriere, Mark T. Wallace. 2009

48 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent electrophysiology studies have suggested that neuronal responses to multisensory stimuli may possess a unique temporal signature. To evaluate this temporal dynamism, unisensory and multisensory spatiotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) of neurons in the cortex of the cat anterior ectosylvian sulcus were constructed. Analyses revealed that the multisensory STRFs of these neurons differed significantly from the component unisensory STRFs and their linear summation. Most notably, multisensory responses were found to have higher peak firing rates, shorter response latencies, and longer discharge durations. More importantly, multisensory STRFs were characterized by two distinct temporal phases of enhanced integration that reflected the shorter response latencies and longer discharge durations. These findings further our understanding of the temporal architecture of cortical multisensory processing, and thus provide important insights into the possible functional role(s) played by multisensory cortex in spatially directed perceptual processes.

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

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Citations in the corpus

Interactions between the spatial and temporal stimulus factors that influence multisensory integration in human performance (2012, unknown): “It was found that for those regions within the receptive fields in which unisensory (i.e., visual-alone, auditory-alone) responses were low, multisensory combinations produced the largest multisensory enhancement (Carriere et al. 2008; Krueger et al. 2009; Royal et al. 2009).”
The Construct of the Multisensory Temporal Binding Window and its Dysregulation in Developmental Disabilities (2014, background): “…time, multisensory (e.g., visual–auditory) stimuli that are spatially and temporally proximate typically result in the largest enhancements in neuronal response (Meredith, Nemitz, & Stein, 1987; Meredith et al., 1992; Meredith & Stein, 1986a, 1996; Royal et al., 2009; Wallace et al., 1996, 2004).”
Looming Signals Reveal Synergistic Principles of Multisensory Integration (2012, background): “, 2008) or subcortical (Royal et al., 2009) structures and furthermore are not straightforwardly predicted by unisensory response patterns.”
Identifying and Quantifying Multisensory Integration: A Tutorial Review (2014, background): “For example, one can measure response duration, response latency, and peak discharge frequency (or peak firing rate, measured from the time bin in which the greatest number of spikes occurred as the average number of spikes per trial within that time bin; Meredith et al. 1987; Royal et al. 2009).”
Multisensory temporal integration: Task and stimulus dependencies (2013, unknown): “A great deal of work has focused on the importance of temporal factors in dictating multisensory interactions and has shown robust effects of stimulus timing at the level of single neurons (Meredith et al. 1987, 1992; Royal et al. 2009), neural populations measured by EEG (Senkowski et al.”
Spatial receptive field organization of multisensory neurons and its impact on multisensory interactions (2009, unknown): “Perhaps most revealing in these spatiotemporal receptive field analyses in AES neurons has been the unveiling of two important temporal epochs in the multisensory response – an early phase during which there is weak or no unisensory responses yet a defined multisensory response, and a late period af”