Laura C. Erickson, Brandon A. Zielinski, Jennifer E. V. Zielinski, Guoying Liu, Peter E. Turkeltaub, Amber M. Leaver, Josef P. Rauschecker
Abstract
Audiovisual (AV) speech integration is often studied using the McGurk effect, where the combination of specific incongruent auditory and visual speech cues produces the perception of a third illusory speech percept. Recently, several studies have implicated the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in the McGurk effect; however, the exact roles of the pSTS and other brain areas in "correcting" differing AV sensory inputs remain unclear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in ten participants, we aimed to isolate brain areas specifically involved in processing congruent AV speech and the McGurk effect. Speech stimuli were composed of sounds and/or videos of consonant-vowel tokens resulting in four stimulus classes: congruent AV speech (AVCong), incongruent AV speech resulting in the McGurk effect (AVMcGurk), acoustic-only speech (AO), and visual-only speech (VO). In group- and single-subject analyses, left pSTS exhibited significantly greater fMRI signal for congruent AV speech (i.e., AVCong trials) than for both AO and VO trials. Right superior temporal gyrus, medial prefrontal cortex, and cerebellum were also identified. For McGurk speech (i.e., AVMcGurk trials), two clusters in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), just posterior to Heschl's gyrus or on its border, exhibited greater fMRI signal than both AO and VO trials. We propose that while some brain areas, such as left pSTS, may be more critical for the integration of AV speech, other areas, such as left pSTG, may generate the "corrected" or merged percept arising from conflicting auditory and visual cues (i.e., as in the McGurk effect). These findings are consistent with the concept that posterior superior temporal areas represent part of a "dorsal auditory stream," which is involved in multisensory integration, sensorimotor control, and optimal state estimation (Rauschecker and Scott, 2009).
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 16 September 2015.
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Altmetric has tracked 23,344,526 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 72nd percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 31,066 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 70% of its peers.
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