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Título del libro: The Senses: A Comprehensive Reference
Título del capítulo: Role of Primary Somatosensory Cortex in Perceptual Touch Detection and Discrimination

Autores UNAM:
RANULFO ROMO TRUJILLO; ADRIAN HERNANDEZ ALVA; VICTOR HUGO DE LAFUENTE FLORES; ANTONIO PAULINO ZAINOS ROSALES; LUIS ALONSO LEMUS SANDOVAL; JESUS MANUEL ALVAREZ LOPEZ;
Autores externos:

Idioma:
Inglés
Año de publicación:
2010
Palabras clave:

Cerebral cortex; Detection; Discrimination; Monkeys; Neurophysiology; Psychophysics; Somatosensory


Resumen:

We review recent studies that address the question of which components of the evoked neuronal activity in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) represent the stimulus features and account for perceptual touch detection and discrimination. The available results suggest that the functional role of S1 in detection and discrimination tasks may be mainly to generate a neural representation of the sensory stimulus for further processing in areas central to S1. Consistent with this interpretation, the activity of S1 neurons covary with the stimulus features and direct activation of the S1 can trigger quantifiable percepts in these tasks. Furthermore, activation of a cluster of S1 neurons with quickly adapting (QA) properties is sufficient to initiate all subsequent neural processes associated with sensory discrimination. Such specificity is suggested by the fact that activation of S1 neurons with slowly adapting (SA) properties cannot produce discrimination but can produce detection. These findings provide a fairly complete panorama of the role of S1 in touch perception and emphasize the importance of studying higher cortical areas, where past and current sensory information provided by S1 are combined to produce perception during these behavioral tasks. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


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