Davis, B. 1 & Hasson, U. . 1, 2
1 Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), The University of Trento, 38123 Mattarello, Italy
2 Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, The University of Trento, 38122 Trento, Italy
Regularities in the environment license predictions that enable adaptive behavior. In prior neuroimaging work sensitivity to single-modality statistical regularities has been associated with hippocampal, anterior cingulate and lateral temporal activity. Our previous work demonstrated sensitivity to the disorder of audio or visual series in modality-specific sensory cortices and frontal regions. Here we replicate and extend this work. Participants were presented with rapid (3.3 Hz) auditory, visual, and audio-visual series (length = 11sec) varying over four levels of disorder. For visual series, we replicate our previous finding of sensitivity to levels of disorder in early visual cortex and the intraparietal sulcus. For auditory series sensitivity was most prominent in the bilateral medial superior temporal cortex. For audio-visual series sensitivity was observed in both audio and visual sensory cortex as well as anterior cingulate and inferior frontal regions. Whole brain contrasts between single and multi-modal conditions revealed clusters sensitive to single modality disorder that were significantly less sensitive to audio-visual disorder. Sensitivity to disorder was identified in both linear and u-shaped profiles. These results provide evidence that sensitivity to disorder relies largely on modality-specific systems, which is reduced in multi-modal contexts, perhaps due to competition between sensory systems or lower-level mutual inhibition.