Steady-stade evoked potentials to research multisensory integration Article Swipe
Every day, we integrate information from different sensory modalities to form a coherent representation of our surroundings. In animals, such multisensory integration is thought to rely on the existence of multimodal neurons able to respond to sensory inputs from different modalities. The presumably same multisensory integration mechanisms occurs in humans. Essentially, when two sensory different stimuli occur close to a body part, the processing appears to be facilitated. This is reflected in behavioural measures, BOLD activity, and event related potentials. However, these effects can also be explained by spatial attention and might not be due to solely multisensory integration. In order to disentangle the effects from spatial attention from the multisensory integration, we apply the steady-state evoked potential (SSEP) methodology. SSEP allows to tag the cortical activity elicited respectively by different stimuli presented simultaneously using different stimulation frequencies, and, thereby, to track and characterize the cortical response to each stimulus independently, as well to use long-lasting stimulations. We show that multisensory integration seems to rely more on short lasting mechanisms, as we did not succeed to replicate the results obtained by different methodologies with the SSEP methodology.
