In this study, a fMRI study was performed in order to reveal the neural system involved in the identification of familiar voices. Compared to the novel voices, the familiar voices identification was associated with activations in the temporal poles (BA38), the left superior temporal sulcus (BA22/39) and the middle temporal gyrus (BA21) junction. These results were consistent with the conclusions of the past researches about faces identification. We also found that the area of middle frontal gyrus (BA6), which function in mental imagery, showed increased activation for the familiar voices relative to the novel ones. We considered that, during the processing of people identification, if only the auditory information was provided, the visual information would be derived from the auditory information and played an important role in the identification.
In this study, we used functional MRI(fMRI) through 12 normal volunteers identified human brain activation about recognition of the length by the tactile sense without visual guidance, and clarified the advanced brain information-processing mechanism of tactile cognition, (1) Intra-parietal sulcus (IPS) is related to generation and memory of tactile mental representation, and lateral occipital cortex (LOC) is related to form analysis and memory of tactile sense, and in dorsal occipital cortex (DOC) attention is further paid to the distance of the fingertips and analysis is performed, and MT/V5 is related to the variance analysis of length to which last time was presented. (2) Right prefrontal area carries out cooperation control of paying attention further and judging repeatedly. (3) When length is judged only by the tactile sense, that Werincke and a high order auditory area in connection with logical judgment activated weakly is the cause by which a cognitive error becomes large. (4) As a cognitive result, the consciousness of tactile mental representation comes out in the Broca domain of right (non-dominant hemisphere) and the consciousness of a reply of length comes out in Broca domain of left (dominant hemisphere). This result suggested that high order tactile cognition was closely related to a high order vision and a high order language information-processing system.