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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on June 2, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(4):962-974; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl007
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Effect of Temporal Asynchrony on the Multisensory Integration of Letters and Speech Sounds

Nienke M. van Atteveldt1, Elia Formisano1, Leo Blomert1 and Rainer Goebel1,2

1 Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Maastricht, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2 F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Address correspondence to Nienke M. van Atteveldt, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. Email: N.vanAtteveldt{at}psychology.unimaas.nl.

Temporal proximity is a critical determinant for cross-modal integration by multisensory neurons. Information content may serve as an additional binding factor for more complex or less natural multisensory information. Letters and speech sounds, which form the basis of literacy acquisition, are not naturally related but associated through explicit learning. We investigated the relative importance of temporal proximity and information content on the integration of letters and speech sounds by manipulating both factors within the same functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design. The results reveal significant interactions between temporal proximity and content congruency in anterior and posterior auditory association cortex, indicating that temporal synchrony is critical for the integration of letters and speech sounds. The temporal profiles for multisensory integration in the auditory association cortex resemble those demonstrated for single multisensory neurons in different brain structures and animal species. This similarity suggests that basic neural integration rules apply to the binding of multisensory information that is not naturally related but overlearned during literacy acquisition. Furthermore, the present study shows the suitability of fMRI to study temporal aspects of multisensory neural processing.

Key Words: audiovisual • auditory cortex • fMRI • STS • temporal proximity


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