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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on April 22, 2009
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(12):2993-3000; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp073
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Integrating Visual and Tactile Information in the Perirhinal Cortex

J. S. Holdstock1, J. Hocking2,3, P. Notley1, J. T. Devlin4 and C. J. Price2

1 School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BS, UK, 2 Wellcome Trust Centre for NeuroImaging, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK, 3 Centre for Magnetic Resonance, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia, 4 Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College London, London WC1H 0AP, UK

Address correspondence to email: juliet{at}julietholdstock.com.

By virtue of its widespread afferent projections, perirhinal cortex is thought to bind polymodal information into abstract object-level representations. Consistent with this proposal, deficits in cross-modal integration have been reported after perirhinal lesions in nonhuman primates. It is therefore surprising that imaging studies of humans have not observed perirhinal activation during visual–tactile object matching. Critically, however, these studies did not differentiate between congruent and incongruent trials. This is important because successful integration can only occur when polymodal information indicates a single object (congruent) rather than different objects (incongruent). We scanned neurologically intact individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they matched shapes. We found higher perirhinal activation bilaterally for cross-modal (visual–tactile) than unimodal (visual–visual or tactile–tactile) matching, but only when visual and tactile attributes were congruent. Our results demonstrate that the human perirhinal cortex is involved in cross-modal, visual–tactile, integration and, thus, indicate a functional homology between human and monkey perirhinal cortices.

Key Words: cross-modal • fMRI • integration • perception • visual–tactile


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