Resolving multisensory and attentional influences across cortical depth in sensory cortices
- University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
- Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
Abstract
In our environment our senses are bombarded with a myriad of signals, only a subset of which is relevant for our goals. Using sub-millimeter-resolution fMRI at 7T we resolved BOLD-response and activation patterns across cortical depth in early sensory cortices to auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli under auditory or visual attention. In visual cortices, auditory stimulation induced widespread inhibition irrespective of attention, whereas auditory relative to visual attention suppressed mainly central visual field representations. In auditory cortices, visual stimulation suppressed activations, but amplified responses to concurrent auditory stimuli, in a patchy topography. Critically, multisensory interactions in auditory cortices were stronger in deeper laminae, while attentional influences were greatest at the surface. These distinct depth-dependent profiles suggest that multisensory and attentional mechanisms regulate sensory processing via partly distinct circuitries. Our findings are crucial for understanding how the brain regulates information flow across senses to interact with our complex multisensory world.
Data availability
Data (sufficient to recreate figures) are publicly available on the OSF project of this study: https://osf.io/63dba/.The raw data of the results presented here are available in a BIDS format upon request: the consent form originally signed by the participants did not allow for making raw data publicly available.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Research Council (Mult-sens)
- Uta Noppeney
Max Planck Society
- Robert Turner
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All procedures were approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Leipzig under the protocol number 273-14: "Magnetresonanz-Untersuchungen am Menschen bei 7 Tesla". Participants gave written informed consent to participate in this fMRI study.
Copyright
© 2020, Gau et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Resolving multisensory and attentional influences across cortical depth in sensory cortices
eLife 9:e46856.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46856
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