title: "Hearing faces and seeing voices": Amodal coding of person identity in the human brain.
abstract: Recognizing familiar individuals is achieved by the brain by combining cues from several sensory modalities, including the face of a person and her voice. Here we used functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and a whole-brain, searchlight multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to search for areas in which local fMRI patterns could result in identity classification as a function of sensory modality. We found several areas supporting face or voice stimulus classification based on fMRI responses, consistent with previous reports; the classification maps overlapped across modalities in a single area of right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). Remarkably, we also found several cortical areas, mostly located along the middle temporal gyrus, in which local fMRI patterns resulted in identity "cross-classification": vocal identity could be classified based on fMRI responses to the faces, or the reverse, or both. These findings are suggestive of a series of cortical identity representations increasingly abstracted from the input modality.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.|Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Bashar
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Awwad Shiekh Hasan
authors.affiliation: Cuban Center for Neuroscience, La Habana, Cuba.
authors.forename: Mitchell
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Valdes-Sosa
authors.affiliation: Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gross
authors.affiliation: Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.|Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.|Institut de Neurosciecnes de la Timone, UMR 7289, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France.
authors.forename: Pascal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Belin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology*