The human hippocampus supports auditory coding and multisensory integration.

Multivariate fMRI shows the human hippocampus represents both auditory and visual scenes, with posterior hippocampus multisensory facilitation for congruent stimuli and anterior crossmodal decoding.

• Why it matters: The hippocampus integrates convergent sensory inputs, but human work has focused mainly on vision, leaving auditory coding and multisensory integration largely untested.
• What they did: Participants viewed repeated short naturalistic movie clips in auditory-only, visual-only, congruent audiovisual, and incongruent audiovisual formats; high-resolution fMRI tested univariate activation and multivariate representations across hippocampal subfields and the longitudinal axis.
• The result: Univariate signals showed only visual responses, while multivariate analyses revealed robust auditory and visual representations; posterior hippocampus pattern similarity increased for congruent versus unisensory stimuli (especially left), and anterior hippocampus supported crossmodal decoding (driven by right), with parallel cortical searchlight effects.

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