AUTHOR=Venezia Jonathan H. , Vaden Kenneth I. , Rong Feng , Maddox Dale , Saberi Kourosh , Hickok Gregory TITLE=Auditory, Visual and Audiovisual Speech Processing Streams in Superior Temporal Sulcus JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience VOLUME=11 YEAR=2017 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00174 DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2017.00174 ISSN=1662-5161 ABSTRACT=
The human superior temporal sulcus (STS) is responsive to visual and auditory information, including sounds and facial cues during speech recognition. We investigated the functional organization of STS with respect to modality-specific and multimodal speech representations. Twenty younger adult participants were instructed to perform an oddball detection task and were presented with auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech stimuli, as well as auditory and visual nonspeech control stimuli in a block fMRI design. Consistent with a hypothesized anterior-posterior processing gradient in STS, auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli produced the largest BOLD effects in anterior, posterior and middle STS (mSTS), respectively, based on whole-brain, linear mixed effects and principal component analyses. Notably, the mSTS exhibited preferential responses to multisensory stimulation, as well as speech compared to nonspeech. Within the mid-posterior and mSTS regions, response preferences changed gradually from visual, to multisensory, to auditory moving posterior to anterior.