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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Directed interactions between auditory and superior temporal cortices and their role in sensory integration

Christoph Kayser¹* and Nikos K. Logothetis^1,2

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany

Division of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Recent studies using functional imaging and electrophysiology demonstrate that processes related to sensory integration are not restricted to higher association cortices but already occur in early sensory cortices, such as primary auditory cortex. While anatomical studies suggest the superior temporal sulcus (STS) as likely source of visual input to auditory cortex, little evidence exists to support this notion at the functional level. Here we tested this hypothesis by simultaneously recording from sites in auditory cortex and STS in alert animals stimulated with dynamic naturalistic audio–visual scenes. Using Granger causality and directed transfer functions we first quantified causal interactions at the level of field potentials, and subsequently determined those frequency bands that show effective interactions, i.e. interactions that are relevant for influencing neuronal firing at the target site. We found that effective interactions from auditory cortex to STS prevail below 20 Hz, while interactions from STS to auditory cortex prevail above 20 Hz. In addition, we found that directed interactions from STS to auditory cortex make a significant contribution to multisensory influences in auditory cortex: Sites in auditory cortex showing multisensory enhancement received stronger feed-back from STS during audio–visual than during auditory stimulation, while sites with multisensory suppression received weaker feed-back. These findings suggest that beta frequencies might be important for inter-areal coupling in the temporal lobe and demonstrate that superior temporal regions indeed provide one major source of visual influences to auditory cortex.

Keywords:

cross-modal, Granger causality, auto-regressive model, directed transfer function, local field potential, superior temporal sulcus, multisensory

Citation:

Kayser C and Logothetis NK (2009). Directed interactions between auditory and superior temporal cortices and their role in sensory integration. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 3:7. doi: 10.3389/neuro.07.007.2009

Received:

02 February 2009;

Paper pending published:

06 April 2009;

Accepted:

16 April 2009;

Published online:

04 May 2009.

Edited by:

Rui M. Costa, National Institutes of Health, USA

Reviewed by:

Asif A. Ghazanfar, Princeton University, USA
Andreas K. Engel, University of Hamburg, Germany
Gernott Supp, University of Hamburg, Germany

© 2009 Kayser and Logothetis. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Christoph Kayser, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstrasse 38, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. e-mail: kayser@tuebingen.mpg.de