Functional imaging of human crossmodal identification and object recognition - PubMed (original) (raw)

Review

. 2005 Oct;166(3-4):559-71.

doi: 10.1007/s00221-005-2396-5. Epub 2005 Jul 19.

Affiliations

Review

Functional imaging of human crossmodal identification and object recognition

A Amedi et al. Exp Brain Res. 2005 Oct.

Abstract

The perception of objects is a cognitive function of prime importance. In everyday life, object perception benefits from the coordinated interplay of vision, audition, and touch. The different sensory modalities provide both complementary and redundant information about objects, which may improve recognition speed and accuracy in many circumstances. We review crossmodal studies of object recognition in humans that mainly employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These studies show that visual, tactile, and auditory information about objects can activate cortical association areas that were once believed to be modality-specific. Processing converges either in multisensory zones or via direct crossmodal interaction of modality-specific cortices without relay through multisensory regions. We integrate these findings with existing theories about semantic processing and propose a general mechanism for crossmodal object recognition: The recruitment and location of multisensory convergence zones varies depending on the information content and the dominant modality.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Curr Biol. 2000 Jun 1;10(11):649-57 - PubMed
    1. Int J Psychophysiol. 2003 Oct;50(1-2):41-9 - PubMed
    1. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Apr 13;101(15):5658-63 - PubMed
    1. Hum Brain Mapp. 2003 Aug;19(4):213-23 - PubMed
    1. Neuropsychologia. 2004;42(8):1079-87 - PubMed

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources