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Somatosensation

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The somatosensory system relays sensory information from the skin, mucous membranes, limbs, and joints. Somatosensation is more familiarly known as the sense of touch. A typical somatosensory pathway includes three types of long neurons: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary neurons have cell bodies located near the spinal cord in groups of neurons called dorsal root ganglia. The sensory neurons of ganglia innervate designated areas of skin called dermatomes.

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Tactile Semiautomatic Passive-Finger Angle Stimulator (TSPAS)

Tactile Semiautomatic Passive-Finger Angle Stimulator (TSPAS)

Published on: July 30, 2020

Object familiarity modulates effective connectivity during haptic shape perception.

Gopikrishna Deshpande¹, Xiaoping Hu, Simon Lacey

¹Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University & Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.

|September 8, 2009

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Object familiarity influences how the brain processes shape through touch. Familiar objects engage visual imagery networks, while unfamiliar objects rely more on direct sensory input for haptic shape perception.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology
Sensory Perception

Background:

Previous research indicated object familiarity modulates the overlap between visual imagery and haptic shape perception.
Activations during visual imagery correlated more with familiar than unfamiliar object haptic perception.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the neural network differences between familiar and unfamiliar object haptic perception using connectivity analyses.
To determine the directionality of information flow (top-down vs. bottom-up) in these networks.

Main Methods:

Task-specific functional and effective connectivity analyses.
Multivariate Granger causality analyses (conventional and zero-lag purged).
Examined brain activity during visual imagery and haptic shape perception of familiar and unfamiliar objects.

Main Results:

Visual imagery and familiar haptic perception activated similar brain networks.
Unfamiliar haptic perception activated a distinct network.
Familiar object processing involved top-down pathways from prefrontal cortex to the lateral occipital complex (LOC).
Unfamiliar object processing involved bottom-up somatosensory input to the LOC.

Conclusions:

Shape representations in the LOC are flexibly accessed via top-down or bottom-up pathways based on task demands.
Visual imagery plays a greater role in LOC activation during haptic perception of familiar objects compared to unfamiliar ones.