von Kriegstein Katharina, Kleinschmidt Andreas, Giraud Anne-Lise
Cognitive Neurology Unit, Department of Neurology, J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2006 Sep;16(9):1314-22. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhj073. Epub 2005 Nov 9.
Recognizing the voices of people we know does not only activate "voice areas" in the temporal lobe but also extraauditory areas including the fusiform "face area" (FFA). This cross-modal effect could reflect that individual face and voice information become specifically associated when becoming acquainted with a person. Here, we addressed whether the ability to have individual face representations 1) plays a role in voice recognition and 2) is required to observe cross-modal responses to voices in face areas. We compared speaker recognition performance and neuroimaging responses during the processing of familiar and nonfamiliar speakers' voices in a developmental prosopagnosic subject (SO) with the respective findings obtained in a group of 9 control subjects. Despite scoring worse than controls on recognition of familiar speakers' voices, SO had normal cross-modal responses in the FFA and normal connectivity between FFA and the voice regions. However, she had reduced activations in areas that usually respond to familiarity with people. An indication for the malfunctioning of her FFA was reduced connectivity of the FFA to a subset of these supramodal areas. In combination these data suggest that 1) voice recognition benefits from the ability to process faces at an individual level and 2) cross-modal association of voices and faces in the brain is achieved by a sensory binding and does not depend on a top-down mechanism subsequent to successful person recognition.
识别我们认识的人的声音不仅会激活颞叶中的“语音区域”，还会激活包括梭状“面部区域”（FFA）在内的听觉外区域。这种跨模态效应可能反映出，在与一个人相识时，个体的面部和声音信息会变得特定相关。在此，我们探讨了拥有个体面部表征的能力是否1）在语音识别中起作用，以及2）对于观察面部区域对声音的跨模态反应是否是必需的。我们比较了一名发展性面孔失认症患者（SO）在处理熟悉和不熟悉说话者声音时的说话者识别表现和神经成像反应，并与一组9名对照受试者的相应结果进行了比较。尽管在识别熟悉说话者的声音方面得分低于对照组，但SO在FFA中具有正常的跨模态反应，并且FFA与语音区域之间具有正常的连接性。然而，她在通常对熟悉的人有反应的区域中的激活减少。她的FFA功能失调的一个迹象是FFA与这些超模态区域的一个子集之间的连接性降低。综合这些数据表明，1）语音识别受益于在个体水平上处理面孔的能力，以及2）大脑中声音和面孔的跨模态关联是通过感觉绑定实现的，并且不依赖于成功识别人之后的自上而下的机制。
