Primary sensory cortices contain distinguishablespatial patterns of activity for each sense

摘要

Whether primary sensory cortices are essentially multisensory or whether they respond toonly one sense is an emerging debate in neuroscience. Here we use a multivariate patternanalysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data in humans to demonstrate thatsimple and isolated stimuli of one sense elicit distinguishable spatial patterns of neuronalresponses, not only in their corresponding primary sensory cortex, but in other primarysensory cortices. These results indicate that primary sensory cortices, traditionallyregarded as unisensory, contain unique signatures of other senses and, thereby, prompt areconsideration of how sensory information is coded in the human brain.