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J Neurophysiol (March 4, 2009). doi:10.1152/jn.91193.2008
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Submitted on November 9, 2008
Revised on March 2, 2009
Accepted on March 2, 2009

Multisensory enhancement in the optic tectum of the barn owl: Spike count and spike timing

Yael Zahar1, Amit Reches1, and Yoram Gutfreund1*

1 The Technion

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: yoramg{at}tx.technion.ac.il.

Temporal and spatial correlations between auditory and visual stimuli facilitate the perception of unitary events and improve behavioral responses. However, it is not clear how combined visual and auditory information is processed in single neurons. Here we studied responses of multisensory neurons in the barn owl's optic tectum (the avian homolog of the superior colliculus) to visual, auditory and bimodal stimuli. We specifically focused on responses to sequences of repeated stimuli. We first report that bimodal stimulation tends to elicit more spikes than in the responses to its unimodal components (a phenomenon known as multisensory enhancement). However, this tendency was found to be history-dependent, multisensory enhancement was mostly apparent in the first stimulus of the sequence and to a much lesser extent in the subsequent stimuli. Next, a vector strength analysis was applied to quantify the phase locking of the responses to the stimuli. We report that in a substantial number of multisensory neurons responses to sequences of bimodal stimuli elicited spike trains that were better phase locked to the stimulus than spike trains elicited by stimulating with the unimodal counterparts (visual or auditory). We conclude that multisensory enhancement can be manifested in better phase locking to the stimulus as well as in more spikes.




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A. Reches and Y. Gutfreund
Auditory and Multisensory Responses in the Tectofugal Pathway of the Barn Owl
J. Neurosci., July 29, 2009; 29(30): 9602 - 9613.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]




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