Emiliano Macaluso

TL;DR: Analysis of effective connectivity between brain areas suggests that touch influences unimodal visual cortex via back-projections from multimodal parietal areas, which provides a neural explanation for crossmodal links in spatial attention.

TL;DR: This review focuses on recent neuroimaging data concerning spatial aspects of multisensory integration in the human brain, and indicates not only that multisENSory integration involves anatomical convergence from sensory-specific cortices into mult isensory ('heteromodal') brain areas, but also that multi-sensory spatial interactions can affect even so-called 'unimodal' brain regions.

TL;DR: It is found that the vestibular network was selectively engaged when acceleration was consistent with natural gravity, demonstrating that predictive mechanisms of physical laws of motion are represented in the human brain.

TL;DR: In observers naïve to art criticism, the sense of beauty is mediated by two non-mutually exclusive processes: one based on a joint activation of sets of cortical neurons, triggered by parameters intrinsic to the stimuli, and the insula (objective beauty); the other based on the activation of the amygdala, driven by one's own emotional experiences (subjective beauty).

TL;DR: PET during audiovisual speech processing used to study how temporal and spatial factors might jointly affect brain activations yielded increased activity in multisensory association areas, plus in some unimodal visual areas.