Searching for cross-modal synchrony – a testbed for the „temporal correlation“ hypothesis?
Andreas K. Engel, Jörg F. Hipp, Till R. Schneider, Simone Lorenz, Markus Siegel, Stefan Debener, Daniel Senkowski
Symposium Talk
Last modified: 2008-05-13
Abstract
The temporal correlation hypothesis posits that coherent oscillations in neural populations, in particular at frequencies in the gamma-band, may play an important role in feature integration. For unisensory processing, oscillatory synchronization phenomena have been reported for all modalities, and available evidence suggests that synchrony does indeed play a key role in integrating perceptual information. This raises the possibility that coherent oscillations may also be involved in the cross-modal integration of signals. In this presentation, we describe evidence obtained in EEG studies supporting the notion of cross-modal interaction by neural coherence: (1) We have carried out cross-modal priming studies, involving both visual-to-auditory and haptic-to-auditory interactions, in which the semantic congruence between stimulus pairs representing natural objects was manipulated. For semantically matching stimuli, we observed an enhancement of gamma-band responses to the second, task-relevant stimulus. Source localization of this gamma-band effect using linear beamforming suggests an involvement of multisensory regions in the left temporal lobe. (2) In addition, we have studied visual-auditory binding using a bistable “bounce-pass�-paradigm where subjects perceive two moving visual objects, presented in conjunction with a collision sound, as either passing or bouncing off each other. Using beamforming analysis of the data, we find that cross-modal binding is associated with enhanced gamma-band activity and decreased alpha-band activity in visual and fronto-parietal regions. Remarkably, gamma-band activity in early visual areas was found to predict the quality of the bistable percept. Together, these data support the hypothesis that coherent oscillatory activity may play an important role in the formation of multisensory percepts.