PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Srikanth R. Damera
AU  - Patrick S. Malone
AU  - Benson W. Stevens
AU  - Richard Klein
AU  - Silvio P. Eberhardt
AU  - Edward T. Auer, Jr.
AU  - Lynne E. Bernstein
AU  - Maximilian Riesenhuber
TI  - Metamodal Coupling of Vibrotactile and Auditory Speech Processing Systems Through Matched Stimulus Representations
AID  - 10.1101/2021.05.04.442660
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.05.04.442660
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/05/2021.05.04.442660.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/05/2021.05.04.442660.full
AB  - It has been postulated the brain is organized by “metamodal”, sensory-independent cortical modules implementing particular computations. Yet, evidence for this theory has been variable. We hypothesized that effective metamodal engagement requires not only an abstract, “cognitive” congruence between cross-modal stimuli but also a congruence between neural representations. To test this hypothesis, we trained participants to recognize vibrotactile versions of auditory words using two encoding schemes. The vocoded approach preserved the dynamics and representational similarities of auditory speech while the token-based approach used an abstract phoneme-based code. Although both groups learned the vibrotactile word recognition task, only in the vocoded group did trained vibrotactile stimuli recruit the auditory speech network and lead to increased coupling between somatosensory and auditory speech areas. In contrast, the token-based encoding appeared to rely on paired-associate learning. Thus, matching neural input representations is a critical factor for assessing and leveraging the metamodal potential of cortical modules.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.