@article {180, title = {Speech-specific tuning of neurons in human superior temporal gyrus.}, journal = {Cereb Cortex}, volume = {24}, year = {2014}, month = {2014 Oct}, pages = {2679-93}, abstract = {

How the brain extracts words from auditory signals is an unanswered question. We recorded approximately 150 single and multi-units from the left anterior superior temporal gyrus of a patient during multiple auditory experiments. Against low background activity, 45\% of units robustly fired to particular spoken words with little or no response to pure tones, noise-vocoded speech, or environmental sounds. Many units were tuned to complex but specific sets of phonemes, which were influenced by local context but invariant to speaker, and suppressed during self-produced speech. The firing of several units to specific visual letters was correlated with their response to the corresponding auditory phonemes, providing the first direct neural evidence for phonological recoding during reading. Maximal decoding of individual phonemes and words identities was attained using firing rates from approximately 5 neurons within 200 ms after word onset. Thus, neurons in human superior temporal gyrus use sparse spatially organized population encoding of complex acoustic-phonetic features to help recognize auditory and visual words.

}, keywords = {Acoustic Stimulation, Adult, Humans, Male, Neurons, Phonetics, Speech Perception, Temporal Lobe}, issn = {1460-2199}, doi = {10.1093/cercor/bht127}, author = {Chan, Alexander M and Dykstra, Andrew R and Jayaram, Vinay and Leonard, Matthew K and Travis, Katherine E and Gygi, Brian and Baker, Janet M and Eskandar, Emad and Hochberg, Leigh R and Halgren, Eric and Cash, Sydney S} } @article {188, title = {Static sound timing alters sensitivity to low-level visual motion.}, journal = {J Vis}, volume = {12}, year = {2012}, month = {2012}, abstract = {

Visual motion processing is essential to survival in a dynamic world and is probably the best-studied facet of visual perception. It has been recently discovered that the timing of brief static sounds can bias visual motion perception, an effect attributed to "temporal ventriloquism" whereby the timing of the sounds "captures" the timing of the visual events. To determine whether this cross-modal interaction is dependent on the involvement of higher-order attentive tracking mechanisms, we used near-threshold motion stimuli that isolated low-level pre-attentive visual motion processing. We found that the timing of brief sounds altered sensitivity to these visual motion stimuli in a manner that paralleled changes in the timing of the visual stimuli. Our findings indicate that auditory timing impacts visual motion processing very early in the processing hierarchy and without the involvement of higher-order attentional and/or position tracking mechanisms.

}, keywords = {Acoustic Stimulation, Attention, Auditory Perception, Humans, Motion Perception, Photic Stimulation, Sound, Time Perception}, issn = {1534-7362}, doi = {10.1167/12.11.2}, author = {Kafaligonul, Hulusi and Stoner, Gene R} } @article {187, title = {Auditory modulation of visual apparent motion with short spatial and temporal intervals.}, journal = {J Vis}, volume = {10}, year = {2010}, month = {2010}, pages = {31}, abstract = {

Recently, E. Freeman and J. Driver (2008) reported a cross-modal temporal interaction in which brief sounds drive the perceived direction of visual apparent-motion, an effect they attributed to "temporal capture" of the visual stimuli by the sounds (S. Morein-Zamir, S. Soto-Faraco, \& A. Kingstone, 2003). Freeman and Driver used "long-range" visual motion stimuli, which travel over long spatial and temporal intervals and engage high-order cortical areas (K. G. Claeys, D. T. Lindsey, E. De Schutter, \& G. A. Orban, 2003; Y. Zhuo et al., 2003). We asked whether Freeman and Driver{\textquoteright}s temporal effects extended to the short-range apparent-motion stimuli that engage cortical area MT, a lower-order area with well-established spatiotemporal selectivity for visual motion (e.g. A. Mikami, 1991, 1992; A. Mikami, W. T. Newsome, \& R. H. Wurtz, 1986a, 1986b; W. T. Newsome, A. Mikami, \& R. H. Wurtz, 1986). Consistent with a temporal-capture account, we found that static sounds bias the perception of both the direction (Experiment 1) and the speed (Experiment 2) of short-range motion. Our results suggest that auditory timing may interact with visual spatiotemporal processing as early as cortical area MT. Examination of the neuronal responses of this well-studied area to the stimuli used in this study would provide a test and might provide insight into the neuronal representation of time.

}, keywords = {Acoustic Stimulation, Auditory Perception, Humans, Motion Perception, Photic Stimulation, Temporal Lobe, Time Perception, Visual Cortex}, issn = {1534-7362}, doi = {10.1167/10.12.31}, author = {Kafaligonul, Hulusi and Stoner, Gene R} }