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Whole brain mapping of visual and tactile convergence in the macaque monkey

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Guipponi, Olivier | Cléry, Justine | Odouard, Soline | Wardak, Claire | Ben Hamed, Suliann

Edité par CCSD ; Elsevier -

International audience. The proposal that sensory processing is achieved in segregated anatomical pathways has been profoundly revisited following the description of cross-modal anatomical connections both at higher and at lower processing levels. However, an understanding of the cortical extent of these long range cross-modal functional influences has been missing. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map, in the non-human primate brain, the cortical regions which are activated by both visual and tactile stimulations. We describe an unprecedented pattern of functional visuo-tactile convergence, encompassing both low-level visual and somatosensory areas and multiple higher-order associative areas. We also show that the profile of this convergence depends on the physical properties of the mapping stimuli, indicating that visuo-tactile convergence is most probably even more prevailing than what we actually describe. Overall, these observations substantiate the view that the brain is massively multisensory.

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