Identifying and quantifying multisensory integration: a tutorial review.

We process information from the world through multiple senses, and the brain must decide what information belongs together and what information should be segregated. One challenge in studying such multisensory integration is how to quantify the multisensory interactions, a challenge that is amplified by the host of methods that are now used to measure neural, behavioral, and perceptual responses. Many of the measures that have been developed to quantify multisensory integration (and which have been derived from single unit analyses), have been applied to these different measures without much consideration for the nature of the process being studied.

Some normative data on lip-reading skills (L).

The ability to obtain reliable phonetic information from a talker's face during speech perception is an important skill. However, lip-reading abilities vary considerably across individuals. There is currently a lack of normative data on lip-reading abilities in young normal-hearing listeners.

Neural processing of asynchronous audiovisual speech perception.

The temporal synchrony of auditory and visual signals is known to affect the perception of an external event, yet it is unclear what neural mechanisms underlie the influence of temporal synchrony on perception. Using parametrically varied levels of stimulus asynchrony in combination with BOLD fMRI, we identified two anatomically distinct subregions of multisensory superior temporal cortex (mSTC) that showed qualitatively distinct BOLD activation patterns. A synchrony-defined subregion of mSTC (synchronous>asynchronous) responded only when auditory and visual stimuli were synchronous, whereas a bimodal subregion of mSTC (auditory>baseline and visual>baseline) showed significant activation to all presentations, but showed monotonically increasing activation with increasing levels of asynchrony.