Laurienti Paul J, Wallace Mark T, Maldjian Joseph A, Susi Christina M, Stein Barry E, Burdette Jonathan H
Department of Radiology, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157, USA.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2003 Aug;19(4):213-23. doi: 10.1002/hbm.10112.
One of the principal functions of the nervous system is to synthesize information from multiple sensory channels into a coherent behavioral and perceptual gestalt. A critical feature of this multisensory synthesis is the sorting and coupling of information derived from the same event. One of the singular features of stimuli conveying such information is their contextual or semantic congruence. Illustrating this fact, subjects are typically faster and more accurate when performing tasks that include congruent compared to incongruent cross-modal stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that activity in select brain areas is sensitive to the contextual congruence among cross-modal cues and to task difficulty. The anterior cingulate gyrus and adjacent medial prefrontal cortices showed significantly greater activity when visual and auditory stimuli were contextually congruent (i.e., matching) than when they were nonmatching. Although activity in these regions was also dependent on task difficulty, showing decreased activity with decreasing task difficulty, the activity changes associated with stimulus congruence predominated.
神经系统的主要功能之一是将来自多个感觉通道的信息整合为连贯的行为和感知整体。这种多感觉整合的一个关键特征是对源自同一事件的信息进行分类和耦合。传达此类信息的刺激的独特特征之一是它们的情境或语义一致性。为说明这一事实，与包含不一致跨模态刺激的任务相比，受试者在执行包含一致跨模态刺激的任务时通常更快且更准确。使用功能磁共振成像，我们证明特定脑区的活动对跨模态线索之间的情境一致性以及任务难度敏感。当视觉和听觉刺激在情境上一致（即匹配）时，前扣带回和相邻的内侧前额叶皮质的活动明显大于它们不匹配时。尽管这些区域的活动也取决于任务难度，即随着任务难度降低活动减少，但与刺激一致性相关的活动变化占主导。
