Visual Enhancement of the Information Representation in Auditory Cortex
Visual Enhancement of the Information Representation in Auditory Cortex
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.068
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发表时间：
2010-01-12
期刊：
影响因子：
9.2
通讯作者：
Panzeri, Stefano
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kayser, Christoph;Logothetis, Nikos K.;Panzeri, Stefano
将不同感觉方式的信息结合起来可以极大地促进我们检测，区分或识别感觉刺激的能力[1，2]。虽然这种感觉整合的过程通常归因于经典的联想皮层，但最近的工作表明，早期感觉皮层中的神经元活动也会受到跨模态输入的影响[3-5]。在这里，我们证明了这种“早期”的多感官影响增强了神经元对多感官刺激的信息。通过记录在听觉皮层的警觉猴子观看自然的视听刺激，我们量化的影响，视觉影响的审判到审判的反应变异性和神经反应所携带的信息量。我们发现，发射率和精确定时的尖峰模式的个别单位变得更可靠的试验和时间时，多感官刺激，导致更大的编码刺激信息。重要的是，当视觉刺激与声音不匹配时，这种多感官信息增强会大大降低。这些结果表明，多感觉的影响，增强信息处理已经在早期阶段的皮层，这表明，感觉整合是一个分布式的过程，开始在较低的感觉区，并继续在较高的协会皮层。
Combining information across different sensory modalities can greatly facilitate our ability to detect, discriminate, or recognize sensory stimuli [1, 2]. Although this process of sensory integration has usually been attributed to classical association cortices, recent work has demonstrated that neuronal activity in early sensory cortices can also be influenced by cross-modal inputs [3-5]. Here we demonstrate that such "early" multisensory influences enhance the information carried by neurons about multisensory stimuli. By recording in auditory cortex of alert monkeys watching naturalistic audiovisual stimuli, we quantified the effect of visual influences on the trial-to-trial response variability and on the amount of information carried by neural responses. We found that firing rates and precisely timed spike patterns of individual units became more reliable across trials and time when multisensory stimuli were presented, leading to greater encoded stimulus information. Importantly, this multisensory information enhancement was much reduced when the visual stimulus did not match the sound. These results demonstrate that multisensory influences enhance information processing already at early stages in cortex, suggesting that sensory integration is a distributed process, commencing in lower sensory areas and continuing in higher association cortices.