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processing deficits on the left side of her body. Gradually, the patient came to feel
touches when she heard certain sounds. A possible explanation for these results is that
latent connections from auditory cortex to somatosensory cortex are now hyperactive,
as further suggested by neuroimaging experiments on this patient (Beauchamp and Ro
2008). As a result, sounds activate somatosensory cortex, which result in the
perceptions of touch. The results from this patient further support a tight link between
sound and touch, and suggest some degree of interchangeability between these two
Sensorymodalities.
In addition to demonstrating some of the ways in which sounds interact with
touch perception, the current results suggest another systematic and more general
medium through which multisensory information might be integrated. Specifically, our
studies extend the work demonstrating spatial and temporal specificity in multisensory
integration and attention (e.g. see Driver and Noesselt 2008; Driver and Spence 1998b;
Stein and Meredith 1993) into the frequency domain. By integrating information from
different sensory modalities based on stimulus frequency, perception might be further
Optimized through this frequency-specific form of multisensory integration. Further
work examining frequency-dependent visual-auditory and visual-tactile integration may
provide the boundary conditions for multisensory interactions based on frequency
information.