Human Touch Receptors Are Sensitive to Spatial Details on the Scale of Single Fingerprint Ridges

Fast-adapting type 1 (FA-1) and slowly-adapting type 1 (SA-1) first-order tactile neurons provide detailed spatiotemporal tactile information when we touch objects with fingertips. The distal axon of these neuron types branches in the skin and innervates many receptor organs associated with fingerprint ridges (Meissner corpuscles and Merkel cell neurite complexes, respectively), resulting in heterogeneous receptive fields whose sensitivity topography includes many highly sensitive zones or "subfields." In experiments on humans of both sexes, using raised dots that tangentially scanned the receptive field we examined the spatial acuity of the subfields of FA-1 and SA-1 neurons and its constancy across scanning speed and direction. We report that the sensitivity of the subfield arrangement for both neuron types on average corresponds to a spatial period of ∼0.4 mm and provide evidence that a subfield's spatial selectivity arises because its associated receptor organ measures mechanical events limited to a single papillary ridge. Accordingly, the sensitivity topography of a neuron's receptive fields is quite stable over repeated mappings and over scanning speeds representative of real-world hand use. The sensitivity topography is substantially conserved also for different scanning directions, but the subfields can be relatively displaced by direction-dependent shear deformations of the skin surface.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The branching of the distal axon of human first-order tactile neurons with receptor organs associated with fingerprint ridges (Meissner and Merkel end-organs) results in cutaneous receptive fields composed of several distinct subfields spread across multiple ridges. We show that the subfields' spatial selectivity typically corresponds to the dimension of the ridges (∼0.4 mm) and a neuron's subfield layout is well preserved across tangential movement speeds and directions representative of natural use of the fingertips. We submit that the receptor organs underlying subfields essentially measure mechanical events at individual ridges. That neurons receive convergent input from multiple subfields does not preclude the possibility that spatial details can be resolved on the scale of single fingerprint ridges by a population code.