Audiovisual synchrony enables integration of dynamic visual and auditory signals into a more robust and reliable multisensory percept. In this fMRI study, we investigated the neural mechanisms by which audiovisual synchrony facilitates shape and motion discrimination under degraded visual conditions. Subjects were presented with visual patterns that were rotated by discrete increments at irregu...

We examined whether the detection of audio-visual temporal synchrony is determined by a pre-attentive parallel process, or by an attentive serial process using a visual search paradigm. We found that detection of a visual target that changed in synchrony with an auditory stimulus was gradually impaired as the number of unsynchronized visual distractors increased (experiment 1), whereas synchron...

Computationally, audio-visual temporal synchrony detection is analogous to visual motion detection in the sense that both solve the correspondence problem. We examined whether audio-visual synchrony detection is mediated by a mechanism similar to low-level motion sensors, by one similar to a higher-level feature matching process, or by both types of mechanisms as in the case of visual motion de...

The understanding of consciousness has been one of the biggest challenges for cognitive science (e.g. Cosmelli et al., 2007; Crick and Koch, 2003; Seth et al., 2006), and the study of the visual system has been its theoretical and empirical starting point. For instance, the consciousness by synchrony hypothesis postulates neuronal synchronization as the putative mechanism of visual consciousnes...

We introduce a synchrony map that translates the fine temporal organization of multi-unit responses in the visual cortex into an easily interpreted spatial display. We test the synchrony map on microelectrode array recordings in Area 17 of anesthetized and paralyzed cats. We first examine the synchrony map using averaged data and probability calculations to demonstrate orientation-dependent cha...

We apply an information-theoretic measure for phase synchrony to local field potentials (LFPs) [corrected] recorded with a multi-electrode array implanted in area V4 of the monkey visual cortex. We show for the first time statistically significant stimulus-dependent synchrony of the visual cortical LFPs and this during different, short time intervals of the response. Furthermore, we could compu...

Previous research suggests that synchronous neural activity underlies perceptual grouping of visual image features. The generality of this mechanism is unclear, however, as previous studies have focused on pairs of neurons with overlapping or collinear receptive fields. By sampling more broadly and employing stimuli that contain partially occluded objects, we have conducted a more incisive test...