Prof. Dirk Bernhardt-Walther | Cross-modal perception of real-world scenes

People perceive their environment through all of their senses. We demonstrate how the brain forms abstract representations of real-world environments that transcend sensory modalities across vision, audition, and thermal perception. Furthermore, cross-modal associations can be controlled using top-down attention. Such attention effects can be shown in the decoding of scene content from fMRI activity patterns in high-level sensory areas as well as prefrontal cortex.