Figure 2.

Pretraining and posttraining fMRI sessions involved matching and control tasks that were presented in paired trials. In the first part of each matching trial, blindfolded subjects listened to a soundscape repeated four times, and in the second part of the trial, touched a tactile shape that either matched or did not match the shape corresponding to the soundscape heard in the first trial. Subjects responded “yes” or “no” with a key press during the scan acquisition following the second part of the trial. A control task involved the same paired-trial procedure during which subjects first listened to an auditory stimulus that was matched for acoustic characteristics to the soundscapes, and then touched a scrambled tactile shape; they made a key press at the end but no yes/no response was required. The posttraining session also contained an additional condition where subjects saw a visual shape in the second half of the matching trial and responded whether or not the soundscape matched the visual shape. The corresponding control condition included a visual scrambled shape.