title: Selective Audiovisual Semantic Integration Enabled by Feature-Selective Attention.
abstract: An audiovisual object may contain multiple semantic features, such as the gender and emotional features of the speaker. Feature-selective attention and audiovisual semantic integration are two brain functions involved in the recognition of audiovisual objects. Humans often selectively attend to one or several features while ignoring the other features of an audiovisual object. Meanwhile, the human brain integrates semantic information from the visual and auditory modalities. However, how these two brain functions correlate with each other remains to be elucidated. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we explored the neural mechanism by which feature-selective attention modulates audiovisual semantic integration. During the fMRI experiment, the subjects were presented with visual-only, auditory-only, or audiovisual dynamical facial stimuli and performed several feature-selective attention tasks. Our results revealed that a distribution of areas, including heteromodal areas and brain areas encoding attended features, may be involved in audiovisual semantic integration. Through feature-selective attention, the human brain may selectively integrate audiovisual semantic information from attended features by enhancing functional connectivity and thus regulating information flows from heteromodal areas to brain areas encoding the attended features.
authors.affiliation: Center for Brain Computer Interfaces and Brain Information Processing, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, China.|Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Brain Computer Interaction and Applications, Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Yuanqing
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Center for Brain Computer Interfaces and Brain Information Processing, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, China.|Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Brain Computer Interaction and Applications, Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Jinyi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Long
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Guangdong General Hospital, Guangzhou, 510080, China.
authors.forename: Biao
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Center for Brain Computer Interfaces and Brain Information Processing, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, China.|Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Brain Computer Interaction and Applications, Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Tianyou
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Center for Brain Computer Interfaces and Brain Information Processing, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, China.|Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Brain Computer Interaction and Applications, Guangzhou 510640, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Guangdong General Hospital, Guangzhou, 510080, China.
authors.forename: Peijun
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
authors.forename: Pei
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sun
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult