Shared Representation of Visual and Auditory Motion Directions in the Human Middle-Temporal Cortex

Abstract

The human occipito-temporal region hMT⁺/V5 is well known for processing visual motion direction. Here, we demonstrate that hMT⁺/V5 also represents the direction of auditory motion in a format partially aligned with the one used to code visual motion. We show that auditory and visual motion directions can be reliably decoded in individually localized hMT⁺/V5 and that motion directions in one modality can be predicted from the activity patterns elicited by the other modality. Despite shared motion-direction information across the senses, vision and audition, however, overall produce opposite voxel-wise responses in hMT⁺/V5. Our results reveal a multifaced representation of multisensory motion signals in hMT⁺/V5 and have broader implications for our understanding of how we consider the division of sensory labor between brain regions dedicated to a specific perceptual function.

Keywords: MVPA; RSA; auditory; cross-modal; decoding; fMRI; hMT(+)/V5; motion; multimodal; visual.