TY - JOUR T1 - Salient sounds activate human visual cortex automatically. AU - McDonald,John J, AU - Störmer,Viola S, AU - Martinez,Antigona, AU - Feng,Wenfeng, AU - Hillyard,Steven A, PY - 2013/5/24/entrez PY - 2013/5/24/pubmed PY - 2013/8/10/medline SP - 9194 EP - 201 JF - The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience JO - J Neurosci VL - 33 IS - 21 N2 - Sudden changes in the acoustic environment enhance perceptual processing of subsequent visual stimuli that appear in close spatial proximity. Little is known, however, about the neural mechanisms by which salient sounds affect visual processing. In particular, it is unclear whether such sounds automatically activate visual cortex. To shed light on this issue, this study examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that were triggered either by peripheral sounds that preceded task-relevant visual targets (Experiment 1) or were presented during purely auditory tasks (Experiments 2-4). In all experiments the sounds elicited a contralateral ERP over the occipital scalp that was localized to neural generators in extrastriate visual cortex of the ventral occipital lobe. The amplitude of this cross-modal ERP was predictive of perceptual judgments about the contrast of colocalized visual targets. These findings demonstrate that sudden, intrusive sounds reflexively activate human visual cortex in a spatially specific manner, even during purely auditory tasks when the sounds are not relevant to the ongoing task. SN - 1529-2401 UR - https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/23699530/Salient_Sounds_Activate_Human_Visual_Cortex_Automatically_ L2 - http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=23699530 DB - PRIME DP - Unbound Medicine ER -