Multisensory interactions occur early in time and in low-level cortical areas, including primary cortices. To test current models of early auditory-visual (AV) convergence in unisensory visual brain areas, we studied the effect of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of visual cortex on behavioral responses to unisensory (auditory or visual) or multisensory (simultaneous auditory-visual) sti...

Spontaneous activity drives the establishment of appropriate connectivity in different circuits during brain development. In mouse primary visual cortex, two distinct patterns spontaneous occur before vision onset: local low-synchronicity events originating retina and global high-synchronicity cortex. We sought to determine contribution these jointly organize network through activity-dependent ...

Recent findings suggest that neural representations in early auditory cortex reflect not only the physical properties of a stimulus, but also high-level, top-down, and even cross-modal information. However, the nature of cross-modal information in auditory cortex remains poorly understood. Here, we used pattern analyses of fMRI data to ask whether early auditory cortex contains information abou...

Three monkeys with extensive preoperative training on visual and auditory memory tasks (delayed matching-to-sample), an auditory pattern-discrimination task, and a visual serial-order task, received bilateral lesions of the superior temporal (ST) cortex in two stages, with testing after each lesion. Unilateral ST cortex lesions resulted in only moderate auditory memory impairments, whereas bila...

The microcircuitry of the neocortex is bewildering in its anatomical detail, but seen through the filters of physiology, some simple circuits have been suggested. Intensive investigations of the cortical representation of orientation, however, show how difficult it is to achieve any consensus on what the circuits are, how they develop, and how they work. New developments in modeling allied with...

What happens in primary visual cortex (V1) when we look at a complex moving image? While motion responses have been investigated thoroughly at the level of single neurons [1–4], studies of motion representation at the level of maps have been restricted to stimuli composed of long bars. These stimuli are inherently ambiguous as to their direction of motion [1]. A recent study by Fitzpatrick and ...