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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 2, 2009, 29(35):10950-10960; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0910-09.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Multisensory Integration of Sounds and Vibrotactile Stimuli in Processing Streams for "What" and "Where"

Laurent A. Renier,^1,2 Irina Anurova,^1,3 Anne G. De Volder,² Synnöve Carlson,^3,4,5 John VanMeter,⁶ and Josef P. Rauschecker¹

¹Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20007, ²Neural Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Université Catholique de Louvain, 54, UCL-54.46, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium, ³Neuroscience Unit, Institute of Biomedicine/Physiology, University of Helsinki, 00290 Helsinki, Finland, ⁴Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, 02015 TKK Espoo, Finland, ⁵Medical School, University of Tampere, 33014 Tampere, Finland, and ⁶Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20057

Correspondence should be addressed to Josef P. Rauschecker at the above address. Email: rauschej{at}georgetown.edu

The segregation between cortical pathways for the identification and localization of objects is thought of as a general organizational principle in the brain. Yet, little is known about the unimodal versus multimodal nature of these processing streams. The main purpose of the present study was to test whether the auditory and tactile dual pathways converged into specialized multisensory brain areas. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare directly in the same subjects the brain activation related to localization and identification of comparable auditory and vibrotactile stimuli. Results indicate that the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and both left and right insula were more activated during identification conditions than during localization in both touch and audition. The reverse dissociation was found for the left and right inferior parietal lobules (IPL), the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) and the right precuneus-SPL, which were all more activated during localization conditions in the two modalities. We propose that specialized areas in the right IFG and the left and right insula are multisensory operators for the processing of stimulus identity whereas parts of the left and right IPL and SPL are specialized for the processing of spatial attributes independently of sensory modality.

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Received Feb. 23, 2009; revised July 17, 2009; accepted July 20, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Josef P. Rauschecker at the above address. Email: rauschej{at}georgetown.edu

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