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Multisensory integration: current issues from the perspective of the single neuron

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 01 May 2008

Key Points

  • Having information from multiple senses converge onto the same neurons allows the neurons to work in concert so that their combined product can enhance the physiological salience of an event, increase the ability to render a judgment about its identity, and initiate responses faster than would otherwise be possible.

  • This interactive synergy among the senses, or 'multisensory integration', is manifested in individual neurons, by enhancing or degrading their responses, and in behaviour, by producing corresponding alterations in performance.

  • Multisensory integration is guided by principles that relate to the spatial and temporal relationship among cross-modal stimuli, as well as to the vigor of the neuron's responses to their individual component stimuli.

  • The spatial principle of multisensory integration relies on faithful register among a neuron's different receptive fields and this register must be maintained in spite of independent movement of the sense organs (such as the eyes). Recent studies suggest that compensation for such movement is less than perfect, and occurs to varying degrees in different neurons and brain regions. Degradation in receptive-field register has strong implications for multisensory integration, but these remain to be examined empirically.

  • Multisensory integration is crucial for high-level cognitive functions in which considerations such as semantic congruence might determine its neural products and the perceptions and behaviours that depend on them.

  • Multiple approaches have demonstrated the impact of multisensory integration in different brain structures in different species, including single-neuron and event-related-potential recordings and brain-imaging techniques.

  • Primary, sensory-specific areas of the brain have now been shown to receive inputs from other senses. The functional role of these other inputs is not yet known, but they might facilitate the processing of information in the native sense.

Abstract

For thousands of years science philosophers have been impressed by how effectively the senses work together to enhance the salience of biologically meaningful events. However, they really had no idea how this was accomplished. Recent insights into the underlying physiological mechanisms reveal that, in at least one circuit, this ability depends on an intimate dialogue among neurons at multiple levels of the neuraxis; this dialogue cannot take place until long after birth and might require a specific kind of experience. Understanding the acquisition and usage of multisensory integration in the midbrain and cerebral cortex of mammals has been aided by a multiplicity of approaches. Here we examine some of the fundamental advances that have been made and some of the challenging questions that remain.

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Figure 1: Multisensory integration aids detection and speeds responses.
Figure 2: Multisensory enhancement in a single superior colliculus neuron.
Figure 3: Superior colliculus multisensory integration depends on the cortex.
Figure 4: Multisensory regions in the monkey and human cortex.
Figure 5: Shifting receptive fields are relevant to multisensory integration.

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Acknowledgements

The author's research is supported in part by NIH grant N536916, EY016716 and EY12389.

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Glossary

Multisensory integration

The neural processes that are involved in synthesizing information from cross-modal stimuli. It should not be confused with the particular underlying neural computation that determines multisensory integration's relative magnitude (superadditive, additive or subadditive).

Cross-modal stimuli

Stimuli from two or more sensory modalities or an event providing such stimuli. This term should not be confused with the term 'multisensory'.

Multisensory enhancement

A situation in which the response to the cross-modal stimulus is greater than the response to the most effective of its component stimuli.

Multisensory depression

A situation in which the response to the cross-modal stimulus is less than the response to the most effective of its component stimuli.

Qualia

The qualities of sensation such as the subjective impression that a sensation gives.

Multisensory neuron

A neuron that responds to, or is influenced by, stimuli from more than one sensory modality.

Receptive field

The area of sensory space in which presentation of a stimulus leads to the response of a particular neuron.

Inverse effectiveness

The phenomenon whereby the degree to which a multisensory response exceeds the response to the most effective modality-specific stimulus component declines as the effectiveness of the modality-specific stimulus components increases.

Additivity

A neural computation in which the multisensory response is not different from the arithmetic sum of the responses to the component stimuli.

Subadditivity

A neural computation in which the multisensory response is smaller than the arithmetic sum of the responses to the component stimuli.

Evoked-potential studies

Electrophysiological studies in which the electrical activity (that is, the electrical potential) of the brain in response to a stimulus is measured using scalp-surface electrodes.

Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal

An index of brain activation based on detecting changes in blood oxygenation with functional MRI.

Superadditivity

A neural computation in which the multisensory response is larger than the arithmetic sum of the responses to the component stimuli.

Summation

A neural computation in which the response to a multisensory stimulus (for example, a number of action potentials) equals the sum of the responses to each of the modality-specific component stimuli presented individually.

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Stein, B., Stanford, T. Multisensory integration: current issues from the perspective of the single neuron. Nat Rev Neurosci 9, 255–266 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2331

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