The Journal of Neuroscience, January 31, 2007, 27(5):1090-1096; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4828-06.2007
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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
What You See Is Not (Always) What You Hear: Induced Gamma Band Responses Reflect Cross-Modal Interactions in Familiar Object Recognition
Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg1 and
Leon Y. Deouell1,2
1Department of Psychology, and 2Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel
Correspondence should be addressed to Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. Email: yuvalsh{at}mscc.huji.ac.il
Gamma-band responses (GBRs) are hypothesized to reflect neuronal synchronous activity related to activation of object representations. However, it is not known whether synchrony in the gamma range is also related to multisensory object processing. We investigated the effect of semantic congruity between auditory and visual information on the human GBR. The paradigm consisted of a simultaneous presentation of pictures and vocalizations of animals, which were either congruent or incongruent. EEG was measured in 17 students while they attended either the auditory or the visual stimulus and performed a recognition task. Behavioral results showed a congruity effect, indicating that information from the unattended modality affected behavior. Irrelevant visual information affected auditory recognition more than irrelevant auditory information affected visual recognition, suggesting a bias toward reliance on visual information in object recognition. Whereas the evoked (phase-locked) GBR was unaffected by congruity, the induced (non-phase-locked) GBR was increased for congruent compared with incongruent stimuli. This effect was independent of the attended modality. The results show that integration of information across modalities, based on semantic congruity, is associated with enhanced synchronized oscillations at the gamma band. This suggests that gamma-band oscillations are related not only to low-level unimodal integration but also to the formation of object representations at conceptual multisensory levels.
Key words: auditory; event-related potentials; EEG; gamma; human; multisensory; object recognition; oscillations; visual
Received July 11, 2006;
accepted Dec. 18, 2006.
Correspondence should be addressed to Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. Email: yuvalsh{at}mscc.huji.ac.il
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J. Neurosci.,
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27(44):
11986 - 11990.
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