Funktionell bildgebende Untersuchung polysensorischer Reizverarbeitung beim Menschen

Spatial orientation depends on the cortical and subcortical integration of different sensory modalities, such as visual, somatosensory and proprioceptive afferents to provide a coherent and unified perception of our surroundings. In the first part the thesis focuses on the integration of a visual signal and a proprioceptive signal (coding for eye movements). The referential integration of these signals is necessary to distinguish between the potential sources producing retinal image motion, namely self vs. object motion. Potentially related cortical areas were identified using functional magnetic resonance tomography (fMRI) (study I). In the second part the establishment of crossmodal links in a somatosensory-visual attention task and the following gradual decay of these associations in a unimodal somatosensory control task were investigated using electroencephalography (study II) and fMRI (study III).