Editor’s Pick: How conflicting audiovisual cues lead to a perceptual illusion

This electroencephalography study by Singh et al. examined how prestimulus brain activity influences perception of the McGurk illusion, a classic multisensory integration effect in which conflicting auditory and visual speech cues (e.g., hearing “ba” while seeing lips say “ga”) lead to the perception of a different, fused syllables.

The authors found that illusion perception was linked to reduced prestimulus alpha and beta power, increased theta and gamma power, and lower aperiodic offset and exponent values across several cortical regions. Importantly, interaction models showed that both oscillatory (periodic) and non-oscillatory (aperiodic) activity jointly shape perceptual outcomes, with aperiodic activity emerging as the predominant contributor to variability.

This study is important because it elucidates the influence of aperiodic activity on multisensory integration, an underexplored avenue in perception research. By integrating oscillatory and aperiodic components of neural activity, the authors address a hot topic in neuroscience: the distinction between oscillatory and non-oscillatory contributions to brain dynamics. Overall, this work makes a novel and important contribution to understanding how brain states influence multisensory perception.

— Anne Keitel, Reviewing Editor

Read the full article:

Prestimulus Periodic and Aperiodic Neural Activity Shapes McGurk Perception
Vinsea A. V. Singh, Vinodh G. Kumar, Arpan Banerjee, and Dipanjan Roy