In rodents, as in other species, regions of secondary somatosensory cortex (SII) may be distinguished from primary cortex (SI) both anatomically and electrophysiologically. However, the number of rodent SII sub-regions, their somatotopic organization, and their function are poorly understood. The presence of multisensory responsive neurons in some areas of SII suggests that one of its roles may...

Perception of our environment is a multisensory experience; information from different sensory systems like the auditory, visual and tactile is constantly integrated. Complex tasks that require high temporal and spatial precision of multisensory integration put strong demands on the underlying networks but it is largely unknown how task experience shapes multisensory processing. Long-term music...

Saccadic reaction time to visual targets tends to be faster when stimuli from another modality (in particular, audition and touch) are presented in close temporal or spatial proximity even when subjects are instructed to ignore the accessory input (focused attention task). Multisensory interaction effects measured in neural structures involved in saccade generation (in particular, the superior ...

Merging information derived from different sensory channels allows the brain to amplify minimal signals to reduce their ambiguity, thereby improving the ability of orienting to, detecting, and identifying environmental events. Although multisensory interactions have been mostly ascribed to the activity of higher-order heteromodal areas, multisensory convergence may arise even in primary sensory...

If a person is trained to recognize or categorize objects or events using one sensory modality, the person can often recognize or categorize those same (or similar) objects and events via a novel modality. This phenomenon is an instance of cross-modal transfer of knowledge. Here, we study the Multisensory Hypothesis which states that people extract the intrinsic, modality-independent properties...

Numerous studies show that practice can result in performance improvements on low-level visual perceptual tasks [1-5]. However, such learning is characteristically difficult and slow, requiring many days of training [6-8]. Here, we show that a multisensory audiovisual training procedure facilitates visual learning and results in significantly faster learning than unisensory visual training. We ...

Multisensory depression is a fundamental index of multisensory integration in superior colliculus (SC) neurons. It is initiated when one sensory stimulus (auditory) located outside its modality-specific receptive field degrades or eliminates the neuron's responses to another sensory stimulus (visual) presented within its modality-specific receptive field. The present experiments demonstrate tha...

Over the last 30 years, our understanding of the neurocognitive bases of consciousness has improved, mostly through studies employing vision. While studying consciousness in the visual modality presents clear advantages, we believe that a comprehensive scientific account of subjective experience must not neglect other exteroceptive and interoceptive signals as well as the role of multisensory i...

Multisensory interactions are the norm in perception, and an abundance of research on the interaction and integration of the senses has demonstrated the importance of combining sensory information from different modalities on our perception of the external world. However, although research on mental imagery has revealed a great deal of functional and neuroanatomical overlap between imagery and ...