Abstract
Accurate and meaningful parcellation of the human cortex is an essential endeavor to facilitate the collective understanding of brain functions across sensory and cognitive domains. Unlike in the visual cortex, the details of anatomical and functional mapping associated with the earliest stages of auditory processing in the cortex are still a topic of active debate. Interestingly, aspects of multisensory processing may provide a unique window to meaningfully subdivide the auditory sensory areas by exploring different functional properties other than the traditional tonotopic approach. In this chapter, a tour of the auditory cortical areas is first provided, starting from its core area, Heschl’s gyrus, then moving onto surrounding areas. Evidence from different sources, including postmortem studies of the human auditory cortex, resting-state functional connectivity derived from the Human Connectome Project, and electrocorticographic studies, is presented to better understand how different subdivisions of the human auditory cortex and its surrounding areas are involved in auditory and multisensory processing. The chapter concludes with the remaining challenges to account for individual variability in functional anatomy, particularly pertaining to multisensory processing.
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Beauchamp, M.S. (2019). Using Multisensory Integration to Understand the Human Auditory Cortex. In: Lee, A., Wallace, M., Coffin, A., Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) Multisensory Processes. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 68. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10461-0_8
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