Temporal-Order Judgment of Audiovisual Events Involves Network Activity Between Parietal and Prefrontal Cortices

Our perception of the temporal order of everyday external events depends on the integrated sensory information in the brain. Our understanding of the brain mechanism for temporal-order judgment (TOJ) of unisensory events, particularly in the visual domain, is advanced. In case of multisensory events, however, there are unanswered questions. Here, by using physically synchronous and asynchronous auditory-visual events in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we identified the brain network that is associated with the perception of the temporal order of multisensory events. The activation in the right temporo-parietal junction was modulated by the perception of asynchronous audiovisual events. During this perception of temporal order, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex coordinated activity with the right temporo-parietal and the left inferior parietal cortices. These results suggest that the TOJ in the multisensory domain underlies a network activity between parietal and prefrontal cortices unlike the regional activity in the right temporo-parietal junction in the unisensory visual domain.