Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 34, Issue 29, Pages 9817-9824Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4869-13.2014
Keywords
ACOP; ERP; sound; visual cortex; visual discrimination
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS-1029084]
- National Institute of Mental Health [1P50MH86385]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [1029084] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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A recent study in humans (McDonald et al., 2013) found that peripheral, task-irrelevant sounds activated contralateral visual cortex automatically as revealed by an auditory-evoked contralateral occipital positivity (ACOP) recorded from the scalp. The present study investigated the functional significance of this cross-modal activation of visual cortex, in particular whether the sound-evoked ACOP is predictive of improved perceptual processing of a subsequent visual target. Atrial-by-trial analysis showed that the ACOP amplitude was markedly larger preceding correct than incorrect pattern discriminations of visual targets that were colocalized with the preceding sound. Dipole modeling of the scalp topography of the ACOP localized its neural generators to the ventrolateral extrastriate visual cortex. These results provide direct evidence that the cross-modal activation of contralateral visual cortex by a spatially nonpredictive but salient sound facilitates the discriminative processing of a subsequent visual target event at the location of the sound. Recordings of event-related potentials to the targets support the hypothesis that the ACOP is a neural consequence of the automatic orienting of visual attention to the location of the sound.
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