& Speech is not a purely auditory signal. From around 2 months of age, infants are able to correctly match the vowel they hear with the appropriate articulating face. However, there is no behavioral evidence of integrated audiovisual perception until 4 months of age, at the earliest, when an illusory percept can be created by the fusion of the auditory stimulus and of the facial cues (McGurk effect). To understand how infants initially match the articulatory movements they see with the sounds they hear, we recorded high-density ERPs in response to auditory vowels that followed a congruent or incongruent silently articulating face in 10-week-old infants. In a first experiment, we determined that auditory–visual integration occurs during the early stages of perception as in adults. The mismatch response was similar in timing and in topography whether the preceding vowels were presented visually or aurally. In the second experiment, we studied audiovisual integration in the linguistic (vowel perception) and nonlinguistic (gender perception) domain. We observed a mismatch response for both types of change at similar latencies. Their topographies were significantly different demonstrating that cross-modal integration of these features is computed in parallel by two different networks. Indeed, brain source modeling revealed that phoneme and gender computations were lateralized toward the left and toward the right hemisphere, respectively, suggesting that each hemisphere possesses an early processing bias. We also observed repetition suppression in temporal regions and repetition enhancement in frontal regions. These results underscore how complex and structured is the human cortical organization which sustains communication from the first weeks of life on. &

Causal role of prefrontal cortex in the threshold for access to consciousness

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Periventricular white matter damage affecting large bundles connecting distant cortical areas may constitute the main neuronal mechanism for the deficit of controlled information processing observed in patients with early multiple sclerosis (MS). Visual backward masking has been demonstrated to affect late stages of conscious perception involving long-range interactions between visual perceptual areas and higher level integrative cortices while leaving intact early feed-forward visual processing and even complex processing such as object recognition or semantic processing. We therefore hypothesized that patients with early MS would have an elevated masking threshold, because of an impairment of conscious perception whereas subliminal processing of masked stimuli would be preserved. Twenty-two patients with early MS and 22 normal controls performed two backward-masking experiments. We used Arabic digits as stimuli and varied quasi-continuously the temporal interval with a subsequent mask, thus allowing us to progressively “unmask ” the stimuli. We finely quantified the visibility of the masked stimuli using both objective and subjective measures, thus obtaining accurate estimates of the threshold duration for access to consciousness. We also studied the priming effect caused by the variably masked numbers on a comparison task performed on a subsequently presented and highly visible target number. The threshold for access to consciousness of masked stimuli was elevated in MS patients compared to controls, whereas non-conscious processing

Early cortical facilitation for emotionally arousing targets during

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/visres Automatic computation of an image’s statistical surprise predicts performance

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia

The delayed consolidation hypothesis of all-or-none conscious perception during

Abstract not found

8 Abstract. Whether masked number priming involves a low-level sensorimotor route or an amodal semantic level of processing remains highly 9 debated. Several alternative interpretations have been put forward, proposing either that masked number priming is solely a byproduct of practice 10 with numbers, or that stimulus awareness was underestimated. In a series of four experiments, we studied whether repetition and congruity 11 priming for numbers reliably extend to novel (i.e., unpracticed) stimuli and whether priming transfers from a visual prime to an auditory target, 12 even when carefully controlling for stimulus awareness. While we consistently observed cross-modal priming, the generalization to novel stimuli 13 was weaker and reached significance only when considering the whole set of experiments. We conclude that number priming does involve an amodal, semantic level of processing, but is also modulated by task settings.