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Updated: Mar 6, 2026

Cross-Modal Multivariate Pattern Analysis
Published on: November 9, 2011
Echoes of the mind's eye: Reciprocal crossmodal interaction between auditory and visual processing
Xiaoyu Tang1,2, Ting Zhang1, Jiaying Sun1
1School of Psychology, Liaoning Collaborative Innovation Center of Children and Adolescents Healthy Personality Assessment and Cultivation, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, China.
Abstract:
Understanding how the brain integrates information across senses is a fundamental challenge. We investigated the mechanisms underlying reciprocal yet temporally asymmetric auditory-visual interactions using high-density EEG during an auditory spatial attention task with auditory-only (A) and audiovisual (AV) stimuli. In the AV condition, sounds were paired with a central, task-irrelevant visual input. Participants attended to sounds on one side (attended) and ignored the other (unattended). Results showed that the visual input affected auditory processing through initial stimulus-driven suppression, reflected in the eliminated auditory contralateral sensory bias (selection negativity, 220-320 ms) and attenuated fronto-temporal connectivity and auditory contralateral occipital positivity (ACOP, 300-500 ms). Subsequently, auditory-to-visual cross-modal attentional spreading exhibited attention-dependent facilitation, emerging over occipital (300-600 ms) and centro-parietal (500-600 ms) regions. These findings support a competitive-facilitative framework in which stimulus-driven suppression precedes goal-driven facilitation, providing a key temporal constraint for computational and neurocognitive models of crossmodal integration.
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