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Auditory and Semantic Cues Facilitate Decoding of Visual Object Category in MEG.

Authors :
Brandman T
Avancini C
Leticevscaia O
Peelen MV
Source :
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) [Cereb Cortex] 2020 Mar 21; Vol. 30 (2), pp. 597-606.
Publication Year :
2020

Abstract

Sounds (e.g., barking) help us to visually identify objects (e.g., a dog) that are distant or ambiguous. While neuroimaging studies have revealed neuroanatomical sites of audiovisual interactions, little is known about the time course by which sounds facilitate visual object processing. Here we used magnetoencephalography to reveal the time course of the facilitatory influence of natural sounds (e.g., barking) on visual object processing and compared this to the facilitatory influence of spoken words (e.g., "dog"). Participants viewed images of blurred objects preceded by a task-irrelevant natural sound, a spoken word, or uninformative noise. A classifier was trained to discriminate multivariate sensor patterns evoked by animate and inanimate intact objects with no sounds, presented in a separate experiment, and tested on sensor patterns evoked by the blurred objects in the 3 auditory conditions. Results revealed that both sounds and words, relative to uninformative noise, significantly facilitated visual object category decoding between 300-500 ms after visual onset. We found no evidence for earlier facilitation by sounds than by words. These findings provide evidence for a semantic route of facilitation by both natural sounds and spoken words, whereby the auditory input first activates semantic object representations, which then modulate the visual processing of objects.<br /> (© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1460-2199
Volume :
30
Issue :
2
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
31216008
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhz110