Adaptation of cortical activity to sustained pressure stimulation on the fingertip

BMC Neuroscience

Research Article

Jang-Yeon Park¹  Hyung-Sik Kim²  Soon-Cheol Chung²  Yoon Gi Chung³  Christian Wallraven³  Sang Woo Han³  Sung-Phil Kim⁴ 

[1] Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research, Institute of Basic Science (IBS), Sungkyunkwan University, 440-746, Suwon, Republic of Korea;Department of Global Biomedical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, 440-746, Suwon, Republic of Korea;Department of Biomedical Engineering, BK21+ Research Institute of Biomedical Engineering, College of Biomedical & Health Science, Konkuk University, 380-701, Chungju, Republic of Korea;Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Anam-5ga, Seongbuk-gu, 136-713, Seoul, Republic of Korea;Department of Human and Systems Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, UNIST-gil 50, 689-798, Ulsan, Republic of Korea;

关键词: Somatosensory cortex;    Tactile adaptation;    Pressure;    Functional connectivity;    fMRI;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12868-015-0207-x

 received in 2015-01-28, accepted in 2015-10-02,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundTactile adaptation is a phenomenon of the sensory system that results in temporal desensitization after an exposure to sustained or repetitive tactile stimuli. Previous studies reported psychophysical and physiological adaptation where perceived intensity and mechanoreceptive afferent signals exponentially decreased during tactile adaptation. Along with these studies, we hypothesized that somatosensory cortical activity in the human brain also exponentially decreased during tactile adaptation. The present neuroimaging study specifically investigated temporal changes in the human cortical responses to sustained pressure stimuli mediated by slow-adapting type I afferents.MethodsWe applied pressure stimulation for up to 15 s to the right index fingertip in 21 healthy participants and acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data using a 3T MRI system. We analyzed cortical responses in terms of the degrees of cortical activation and inter-regional connectivity during sustained pressure stimulation.ResultsOur results revealed that the degrees of activation in the contralateral primary and secondary somatosensory cortices exponentially decreased over time and that intra- and inter-hemispheric inter-regional functional connectivity over the regions associated with tactile perception also linearly decreased or increased over time, during pressure stimulation.ConclusionThese results indicate that cortical activity dynamically adapts to sustained pressure stimulation mediated by SA-I afferents, involving changes in the degrees of activation on the cortical regions for tactile perception as well as in inter-regional functional connectivity among them. We speculate that these adaptive cortical activity may represent an efficient cortical processing of tactile information.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Chung et al. 2015

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