Responses of Prefrontal Multisensory Neurons to Mismatching Faces and Vocalizations

By M. Diehl, Lizabeth M. Romanski. 2014

53 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social communication relies on the integration of auditory and visual information, which are present in faces and vocalizations. Evidence suggests that the integration of information from multiple sources enhances perception compared with the processing of a unimodal stimulus. Our previous studies demonstrated that single neurons in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) of the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) respond to and integrate conspecific vocalizations and their accompanying facial gestures. We were therefore interested in how VLPFC neurons respond differentially to matching (congruent) and mismatching (incongruent) faces and vocalizations. We recorded VLPFC neurons during the presentation of movies with congruent or incongruent species-specific facial gestures and vocalizations as well as their unimodal components. Recordings showed that while many VLPFC units are multisensory and respond to faces, vocalizations, or their combination, a subset of neurons showed a significant change in neuronal activity in response to incongruent versus congruent vocalization movies. Among these neurons, we typically observed incongruent suppression during the early stimulus period and incongruent enhancement during the late stimulus period. Incongruent-responsive VLPFC neurons were both bimodal and nonlinear multisensory, fostering their ability to respond to changes in either modality of a face-vocalization stimulus. These results demonstrate that ventral prefrontal neurons respond to changes in either modality of an audiovisual stimulus, which is important in identity processing and for the integration of multisensory communication information.

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

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. German Ignacio Parisi
2. Stefan Wermter
3. Pablo V. A. Barros
4. Xun Liu
5. Sven Magg

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. German Ignacio Parisi
2. Stefan Wermter
3. Pablo V. A. Barros
4. Xun Liu
5. Haiyan Wu

In Sensory Systems

1. German Ignacio Parisi
2. Stefan Wermter
3. Pablo V. A. Barros
4. Xun Liu

Citations in the corpus

• A Neurorobotic Experiment for Crossmodal Conflict Resolution in Complex Environments * (2018, background): “However, a more extensive study is required to verify this hypothesis and measure the modulatory effects of expectation learning [16].”