ABSTRACT
A highly influential neural model of face perception suggests that the aspects of faces that change visibly are processed by a neural pathway leading to the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). During emotion perception, the role of the posterior STS may extend beyond the visual function of perceiving facial emotion to serve a wider purpose related to the crossmodal integration of facial and vocal signals. Some aspects of faces, such as identity, are relatively fixed whereas other aspects, such as facial expression, can change from moment to moment. The STS is a prime candidate for the integration of visual and auditory emotive signals. The STS lies between primary auditory and visual cortices, and studies of audiovisual (AV) speech integration have demonstrated supra-additive responses in the STS to congruent speech stimuli. The authors used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to provide information about the neural time course, frequency content, and location of crossmodal emotion integration.
