TY - JOUR T1 - Hierarchical Brain Network for Face and Voice Integration of Emotion Expression JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/197426 SP - 197426 AU - Jodie Davies-Thompson AU - Giulia V. Elli AU - Mohamed Rezk AU - Stefania Benetti AU - Markus van Ackeren AU - Olivier Collignon Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/31/197426.abstract N2 - The brain has separate specialized computational units to process faces and voices located in occipital and temporal cortices. However, humans seamlessly integrate signals from the faces and voices of others for optimal social interaction. How are emotional expressions, when delivered by different sensory modalities (faces and voices), integrated in the brain? In this study, we characterized the brains’ response to faces, voices, and combined face-voice information (congruent, incongruent), which varied in expression (neutral, fearful). Using a whole-brain approach, we found that only the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rpSTS) responded more to bimodal stimuli than to face or voice alone but only when the stimuli contained emotional expression. Face-and voice-selective regions of interest extracted from independent functional localizers, similarly revealed multisensory integration in the face-selective rpSTS only; further, this was the only face-selective region that also responded significantly to voices. Dynamic Causal Modeling revealed that the rpSTS receives unidirectional information from the face-selective fusiform face area (FFA), and voice-selective temporal voice area (TVA), with emotional expression affecting the connection strength. Our study promotes a hierarchical model of face and voice integration, with convergence in the rpSTS, and that such integration depends on the (emotional) salience of the stimuli.This study was supported in part by the Center for Mind and Brain Science (CIMeC), University of Trento and by a European Research Council starting grant attributed to OC (MADVIS: ERC-StG 337573). We thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments on our original manuscript. ER -