Renier Laurent A, Anurova Irina, De Volder Anne G, Carlson Synnöve, VanMeter John, Rauschecker Josef P
Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20007, USA.
J Neurosci. 2009 Sep 2;29(35):10950-60. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0910-09.2009.
The segregation between cortical pathways for the identification and localization of objects is thought of as a general organizational principle in the brain. Yet, little is known about the unimodal versus multimodal nature of these processing streams. The main purpose of the present study was to test whether the auditory and tactile dual pathways converged into specialized multisensory brain areas. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare directly in the same subjects the brain activation related to localization and identification of comparable auditory and vibrotactile stimuli. Results indicate that the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and both left and right insula were more activated during identification conditions than during localization in both touch and audition. The reverse dissociation was found for the left and right inferior parietal lobules (IPL), the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) and the right precuneus-SPL, which were all more activated during localization conditions in the two modalities. We propose that specialized areas in the right IFG and the left and right insula are multisensory operators for the processing of stimulus identity whereas parts of the left and right IPL and SPL are specialized for the processing of spatial attributes independently of sensory modality.
大脑中用于物体识别和定位的皮质通路之间的分离被认为是大脑的一种普遍组织原则。然而，对于这些处理流的单模态与多模态性质，我们却知之甚少。本研究的主要目的是测试听觉和触觉双重通路是否汇聚到专门的多感觉脑区。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）在同一受试者中直接比较与可比较的听觉和振动触觉刺激的定位和识别相关的脑激活情况。结果表明，在触觉和听觉中，右侧额下回（IFG）以及左右脑岛在识别条件下比在定位条件下更活跃。在左右顶下小叶（IPL）、左侧顶上小叶（SPL）和右侧楔前叶 - SPL中发现了相反的分离情况，在这两种感觉模式的定位条件下，这些区域都更活跃。我们提出，右侧IFG以及左右脑岛中的专门区域是用于处理刺激身份的多感觉操作器，而左右IPL和SPL的部分区域则专门用于独立于感觉模式处理空间属性。
