Department of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA.
Front Neural Circuits. 2012 Sep 5;6:61. doi: 10.3389/fncir.2012.00061. eCollection 2012.
The inferior colliculus (IC) is an essential stop early in the ascending auditory pathway. Though normally thought of as a predominantly auditory structure, recent work has uncovered a variety of non-auditory influences on firing rate in the IC. Here, we map the location within the IC of neurons that respond to the onset of a fixation-guiding visual stimulus. Visual/visuomotor associated activity was found throughout the IC (overall, 84 of 199 sites tested or 42%), but with a far reduced prevalence and strength along recording penetrations passing through the tonotopically organized region of the IC, putatively the central nucleus (11 of 42 sites tested, or 26%). These results suggest that visual information has only a weak effect on early auditory processing in core regions, but more strongly targets the modulatory shell regions of the IC.
下丘（IC）是听觉上行通路中的一个重要中转站。尽管通常被认为是一个主要的听觉结构，但最近的研究发现，IC 中的放电率受到各种非听觉因素的影响。在这里，我们绘制了对注视引导视觉刺激起始做出反应的神经元在 IC 中的位置。在整个 IC 中都发现了视觉/视动相关活动（总体而言，在 199 个测试部位中有 84 个，占 42%），但在通过假定的中央核（42 个测试部位中的 11 个，占 26%）穿过具有音调组织区域的记录穿透中，这种活动的出现频率和强度要低得多。这些结果表明，视觉信息对核心区域的早期听觉处理只有微弱的影响，但更强烈地靶向 IC 的调制壳区域。
