Merging information from multiple senses provides a more reliable percept of our environment. Yet, little is known about where and how various sensory features are combined within the cortical hierarchy. Combining functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysics, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying integration of audiovisual object features. Subjects categorized or passively...

Audiovisual speech has a stereotypical rhythm that is between 2 and 7 Hz, and deviations from this frequency range in either modality reduce intelligibility. Understanding how audiovisual speech evolved requires investigating the origins of this rhythmic structure. One hypothesis is that the rhythm of speech evolved through the modification of some pre-existing cyclical jaw movements in a prima...

BACKGROUND During speech perception, the ability to integrate auditory and visual information causes speech to sound louder and be more intelligible, and leads to quicker processing. This integration is important in early language development, and also continues to affect speech comprehension throughout the lifespan. Previous research shows that individuals with autism have difficulty integrati...

Lip-read speech is integrated with heard speech at various neural levels. Here, we investigated the extent to which lip-read induced modulations of the auditory N1 and P2 (measured with EEG) are indicative of speech-specific audiovisual integration, and we explored to what extent the ERPs were modulated by phonetic audiovisual congruency. In order to disentangle speech-specific (phonetic) integ...

Coherent perception of objects in our environment often requires perceptual integration of auditory and visual information. Recent behavioral data suggest that audiovisual integration depends on attention. The current study investigated the neural basis of audiovisual integration using 3-Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 12 healthy volunteers during attention to auditory or ...

Saccades to combined audiovisual stimuli often have reduced saccadic reaction times (SRTs) compared with those to unimodal stimuli. Neurons in the intermediate/deep layers of the superior colliculus (dSC) are capable of integrating converging sensory inputs to influence the time to saccade initiation. To identify how neural processing in the dSC contributes to reducing SRTs to audiovisual stimu...

Exposure to audiovisually presented vocoded speech is more effective than exposure to auditory-only vocoded speech in improving the subsequent ability to understand vocoded speech [1]. In addition, improvements in the audiovisual training condition were more rapid and greater in magnitude than in the auditory-only condition. The current study was conducted to establish whether exposure to concu...

To reveal the mechanisms underpinning the influence of auditory input on visual awareness, we examine, (1) whether purely semantic-based multisensory integration facilitates the access to visual awareness for familiar visual events, and (2) whether crossmodal semantic priming is the mechanism responsible for the semantic auditory influence on visual awareness. Using continuous flash suppression...

Changes in sensory and multisensory function are increasingly recognized as a common phenotypic characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Furthermore, much recent evidence suggests that sensory disturbances likely play an important role in contributing to social communication weaknesses-one of the core diagnostic features of ASD. An established sensory disturbance observed in ASD is re...

In this study, the effects of audiovisual training were examined for Japanese children learning the English /r/-/l/ contrast. After 10 audiovisual training sessions, participants’ improvement in English /r/-/l/ identification in audiovisual, visual-only and audio-only conditions was assessed. The results demonstrated that Japanese children significantly improved in their English /r/-/l/ identif...