About this Research Topic
Auditory and visual sensations are two indispensable elements for human to understand and feel the colorful world, which fundamentally form cognitive ability. Recently, it has been found that various hearing and visual impairments, such as age-related hearing loss, tinnitus and congenital cataract, would affect the cognitive function of patients, which concretely shows that their efficiency in processing audio-visual information is different from that of normal people. The relevant patients often display stronger audio-visual integration when they execute some audio-visual speech tasks. In addition, experts discovered that the reduction of auditory or visual input would cause compensatory functional alterations in another sensory cortex and thus came up with a model------the audio-visual cross-modal. The remodeling of audio-visual cross-modal is partly related to the visual speech-reading ability and auditory attention in patients. Therefore, audio-visual interactions in the brain neural network and their influence on cognitive function have gradually become the focus of neuroscience research. However, how the altered cross-modal connectivity between visual and auditory cortex affects other brain regions or its relationship with cognitive function remains undetected.
With the development of neuroimaging techniques, multichannel quantitative EEG and multimodal fMRI are widely applied in the study of audio-visual cross-modal’s neural mechanism. Some recent EEG or fMRI researchers prompted that the temporal lobe was a critical area for integrating audio-visual information. In addition, audio-visual cross-modal reorganization is also proved to be associated with the allocation of holistic resources in various brain regions by fMRI methods, which might be a potential clue to demonstrate the relationship between audio-visual cross-modal plasticity and cognitive competence. Also, improved audio-visual interaction was detected in patients with cochlear implants in an EEG study, which could be treated as prognostic indicator of such diseases. Without a doubt, neuroimaging approaches enable us to explore the underlying principles and neural mechanism of brain network, as well as functional alteration of different brain regions in various audio-visual disorders. Thus, we encourage more specialists to apply relevant neuroimaging techniques in the neural mechanism of audio-visual cross-modal to promote a deeper understanding of the relationship between audio-visual sensation and cognition.
In this Research Topic, we welcome research from different perspectives to discuss cutting-edge advance in understanding how the audio-visual cross-modal plasticity works in complicated brain cognitive neural network by using neuroimaging approaches. More specifically, submissions may be related to (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Changes of audio-visual multisensory integration performance induced by auditory or visual sensory loss.
- Central plasticity of audio-visual cross modal induced by auditory or visual sensory loss.
- Changes of visual or auditory behavioral performance or central plasticity of age-related hearing loss.
With the development of neuroimaging techniques, multichannel quantitative EEG and multimodal fMRI are widely applied in the study of audio-visual cross-modal’s neural mechanism. Some recent EEG or fMRI researchers prompted that the temporal lobe was a critical area for integrating audio-visual information. In addition, audio-visual cross-modal reorganization is also proved to be associated with the allocation of holistic resources in various brain regions by fMRI methods, which might be a potential clue to demonstrate the relationship between audio-visual cross-modal plasticity and cognitive competence. Also, improved audio-visual interaction was detected in patients with cochlear implants in an EEG study, which could be treated as prognostic indicator of such diseases. Without a doubt, neuroimaging approaches enable us to explore the underlying principles and neural mechanism of brain network, as well as functional alteration of different brain regions in various audio-visual disorders. Thus, we encourage more specialists to apply relevant neuroimaging techniques in the neural mechanism of audio-visual cross-modal to promote a deeper understanding of the relationship between audio-visual sensation and cognition.
In this Research Topic, we welcome research from different perspectives to discuss cutting-edge advance in understanding how the audio-visual cross-modal plasticity works in complicated brain cognitive neural network by using neuroimaging approaches. More specifically, submissions may be related to (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Changes of audio-visual multisensory integration performance induced by auditory or visual sensory loss.
- Central plasticity of audio-visual cross modal induced by auditory or visual sensory loss.
- Changes of visual or auditory behavioral performance or central plasticity of age-related hearing loss.
Keywords: Audio-visual cross-modal, Auditory sensation, Visual sensation, Neuroimaging, EEG, fMRI
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
