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Abstract

While the superior temporal regions (STR) of the primate brain have been reliably implicated in the processing of biologically relevant auditory and visual events, a number of open questions on the functional and behavioral role of audiovisual activity in these regions remain unresolved. This symposium brings together young investigators to present and discuss a variety of perspectives obtained from work in both humans and nonhuman primates, neuronal activity at different spatio-temporal scales, and multiple behavioral contexts. The different studies presented here have a common goal to address the extent to which audiovisual activity in superior temporal regions reflects functional multisensory integration. In particular, they aimed to disentangle whether STR actively relays and gates audiovisual information in a behaviorally relevant manner, or whether it merely represents a multisensory responsive hub supporting crossmodal convergence: Dr. Blank will present human fMRI results and discuss to what extent crossmodal activation of superior temporal regions by congruent prior information is behaviorally relevant to improve speech perception in difficult conditions. Dr. Thelen will present human ERP findings addressing the following questions: How does the STG contribute to audiovisual object memory trace formation and unisensory object recognition? What role does the STG play in multisensory object processing and how does activity within these areas relate to object category and/or semantic contingency? Catherine Perrodin will present extracellular recordings in rhesus macaques that shed light on the role played by neurons at different processing stages in the temporal lobe (STG vs. STS) in the integration of audiovisual communication signals.