Multisensory integration and attention

描述（由申请人提供）：来自人类行为、心理物理学、ERP和fMRI以及动物单单位研究的会聚证据突出了跨感觉模态相互作用的重要性。然而，关于早期多感觉刺激如何收敛仍然存在争议。一种观点认为，感觉流只有在经过单峰皮层处理后才在多峰皮层中汇聚。这种观点并不排除反馈到单峰皮层区域的可能性，但与早期单峰皮层直接受多感觉刺激影响的观点相反。虽然有证据表明，多感官刺激影响早期的感觉皮层，它还没有被证明，注意到一个特定的方式调制的时间和空间范围的多感官相互作用直接在人类。这个项目的目标是描绘的神经基础和多感觉整合的注意力的影响。我们预测，当注意力被引导到一个感觉模态，单峰刺激将在早期lavelet增强一致的观点，即多通道注意调制早期感觉处理在皮层。此外，我们预测，同步的听觉和视觉多感官刺激将引起较大的神经反应，在lavelet反映早期感觉处理和头皮分布和源定位分析将表明，这种调制发生在皮层处理的早期。最后，我们预测，注意到不同的感官形式将导致进一步增强多感官活动出席的方式。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Convergent evidence from behavior, psychophysics, ERP, and fMRI in humans, as well as single unit studies in animals highlights the importance of interactions across sensory modalities. However, there is still controversy about how early multisensory stimuli converge. One view holds that sensory streams converge in polymodal cortices only after being processed by unimodal cortices. This view does not exclude the possibility of feedback to unimodal cortical areas but is in contrast to the view that early unimodal cortices are affected by multisensory stimuli directly. While there is evidence that multisensory stimuli affect early sensory cortices, it has not been demonstrated that attention to a specific modality modulates the timing and spatial extent of multisensory interactions directly in humans. The goal of this project is to delineate the neural underpinnings and influence of attention on multisensory integration. We predict that when attention is directed to a sensory modality, unimodal stimuli will be enhanced at early latencies consistent with the view that intermodal attention modulates early sensory processing in the cortex. Furthermore, we predict that synchronous auditory and visual multisensory stimuli will elicit larger neural responses at latencies reflecting early sensory processing and that scalp distributions and source localization analyses will indicate that this modulation is occurring early in cortical processing. Finally, we predict that attention to different sensory modalities will result in further enhanced multisensory activity to the attended modality.