Dataset Information

Looking at the hand modulates the brain responses to nociceptive and non-nociceptive somatosensory stimuli but does not necessarily modulate their perception.

ABSTRACT: Previous studies have suggested that looking at the hand can reduce the perception of pain and the magnitude of the ERPs elicited by nociceptive stimuli delivered onto the hand. In contrast, other studies have suggested that looking at the hand can increase tactile sensory discrimination performance, and enhance the magnitude of the ERPs elicited by tactile stimulation. These opposite effects could be related to differences in the crossmodal effects between vision, nociception, and touch. However, these differences could also be related to the use of different experimental designs. Importantly, most studies on the effects of vision on pain have relied on a mirror to create the illusion that the reflected hand is a direct view of the stimulated hand. Here, we compared the effects of direct versus mirror vision of the hand versus an object on the perception and ERPs elicited by non-nociceptive and nociceptive stimuli. We did not observe any significant effect of vision on the perceived intensity. However, vision of the hand did reduce the magnitude of the nociceptive N240 wave, and enhanced the magnitude of the non-nociceptive P200. Our results confirm that vision of the body differentially affects nociceptive and non-nociceptive processing, but question the robustness of visual analgesia.

SUBMITTER: Torta DM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5338730 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Looking at the hand modulates the brain responses to nociceptive and non-nociceptive somatosensory stimuli but does not necessarily modulate their perception.

Torta Diana M DM Legrain Valéry V Mouraux André A

Psychophysiology 20150427 8

Previous studies have suggested that looking at the hand can reduce the perception of pain and the magnitude of the ERPs elicited by nociceptive stimuli delivered onto the hand. In contrast, other studies have suggested that looking at the hand can increase tactile sensory discrimination performance, and enhance the magnitude of the ERPs elicited by tactile stimulation. These opposite effects could be related to differences in the crossmodal effects between vision, nociception, and touch. Howeve ...[more]

PMID: 25917217

Similar Datasets

Project description:The integration of stimuli from different sensory modalities forms the basis for human perception. While the relevant impact of visual stimuli on the perception of other sensory modalities is recognized, much less is known about the impact of auditory stimuli on general sensory processing. This study aims to investigate the effect of acoustic stimuli on the processing of somatosensory stimuli using real noise (i.e., unpleasant everyday noise, RN) and neutral white noise (WN). To this purpose, we studied 20 healthy human subjects between 20 and 29 years of age (mean: 24, SD: ±1.9 years sex ratio 1:1). Somatosensory perception was evaluated using mechanical detection threshold (MDT) of the skin on the back of the dominant hand. To investigate the underlying mechanisms in the brain, fMRI was performed while applying acoustic stimulation (RN and WN) and tactile stimulation of the dominant hand. Here we show that acoustic stimulation with noise alters the perception of touch on the skin. We found that the effect of RN and WN differed. RN leads to an improved tactile perception, whereas WN impaired tactile perception. These changes go along with significant differences in brain activity and connectivity. WN is associated with a significant increase in brain activity in multiple brain areas such as the auditory and somatosensory cortex, parietal association cortex, and the thalamus compared to RN. With tactile stimulation of the skin, the flow of information in these brain areas is altered. While with RN the information flow from the thalamus to the somatosensory cortex is prominent, the network activity pattern changes under WN revealing an increase in interaction between multiple networks. Unpleasant noise inhibits the multisensory integration and enables a more efficient unimodal perception in the somatosensory system, improving perception. Whether this is to be interpreted as a temporary increase in phasic alertness or by a stronger filter function of the thalamus with a preference for unimodal stimuli is still open for debate.

Project description:The human hand can detect both form and texture information of a contact surface. The detection of skin displacement (sustained stimulus) and changes in skin displacement (transient stimulus) are thought to be mediated in different tactile channels; however, tactile form perception may use both types of information. Here, we studied whether both the temporal frequency and the temporal coherency information of tactile stimuli encoded in sensory neurons could be used to recognize the form of contact surfaces. We used the fishbone tactile illusion (FTI), a known tactile phenomenon, as a probe for tactile form perception in humans. This illusion typically occurs with a surface geometry that has a smooth bar and coarse textures in its adjacent areas. When stroking the central bar back and forth with a fingertip, a human observer perceives a hollow surface geometry even though the bar is physically flat. We used a passive high-density pin matrix to extract only the vertical information of the contact surface, suppressing tangential displacement from surface rubbing. Participants in the psychological experiment reported indented surface geometry by tracing over the FTI textures with pin matrices of the different spatial densities (1.0 and 2.0 mm pin intervals). Human participants reported that the relative magnitude of perceived surface indentation steeply decreased when pins in the adjacent areas vibrated in synchrony. To address possible mechanisms for tactile form perception in the FTI, we developed a computational model of sensory neurons to estimate temporal patterns of action potentials from tactile receptive fields. Our computational data suggest that (1) the temporal asynchrony of sensory neuron responses is correlated with the relative magnitude of perceived surface indentation and (2) the spatiotemporal change of displacements in tactile stimuli are correlated with the asynchrony of simulated sensory neuron responses for the fishbone surface patterns. Based on these results, we propose that both the frequency and the asynchrony of temporal activity in sensory neurons could produce tactile form perception.

Dataset Information

Looking at the hand modulates the brain responses to nociceptive and non-nociceptive somatosensory stimuli but does not necessarily modulate their perception.

Publications

Looking at the hand modulates the brain responses to nociceptive and non-nociceptive somatosensory stimuli but does not necessarily modulate their perception.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets