1.3 Hypothesis, A supramodal organisation

Following the thoughts if 1.1 and 1.2, we hypothesise that the resting-state functional connectivity will show a clear dissociation of the auditory ‘what’ and ‘where’-streams: the auditory ‘where’-stream preferentially connects to the Frontal Eye Field (FEF), and the auditory ‘what’-stream to the anterior Inferior Frontal Junction (IFJa).
If confirmed, this dissociation would provide evidence for a supramodal organisational principle of the prefrontal cortex, with FEF and IFJa acting as domain-general hubs for top-down attentional control across sensory modalities (Spagna et al. (2015)). This study tests a first step toward that larger claim by examining whether FEF and IFJa connectivity patterns in the auditory domain match those established for vision.

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