The Nose Smells What the Eye Sees

摘要: Human olfactory perception is notoriously unreliable, but shows substantial benefits from visual cues, suggesting important crossmodal integration between these primary sensory modalities. We used event-related fMRI to determine the underlying neural mechanisms of olfactory-visual in human brain. Subjects participated an detection task, whereby odors and pictures were delivered separately or together. By manipulating degree semantic correspondence odor-picture pairs, we show a perceptual facilitation for semantically congruent (versus incongruent) trials. This behavioral advantage was associated with enhanced activity anterior hippocampus rostromedial orbitofrontal cortex. suggest findings can be interpreted as indicating that mediates reactivation associations, even absence explicit memory processing.