Revealing the neural fingerprints of a missing hand

Kikkert, Sanne; Kolasinski, James; Jbabdi, Saâd; Tracey, Irene; Beckmann, Christian F.; Johansen‐Berg, Heidi; Makin, Tamar R.

doi:10.7554/elife.15292

Cited by 121 publications

(198 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Error bars = SEM. FST, foot size task; HST, hand size task; *significant difference (p < .05) between pre-and post-rTMS assessment limb seems to remain stable despite the loss of the peripheral input (Kikkert et al, 2016;Makin & Bensmaia, 2017;Makin, Scholz, Henderson Slater, Johansen-Berg, & Tracey, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Somatosensory cortical representation of the body size

Giurgola

Pisoni

Maravita

et al. 2019

Human Brain Mapping

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The knowledge of the size of our own body parts is essential for accurately moving in space and efficiently interact with objects. A distorted perceptual representation of the body size often represents a core diagnostic criterion for some psychopathological conditions. The metric representation of the body was shown to depend on somatosensory afferences: local deafferentation indeed causes a perceptual distortion of the size of the anesthetized body part. A specular effect can be induced by altering the cortical map of body parts in the primary somatosensory cortex. Indeed, the present study demonstrates, in healthy adult participants, that repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to the somatosensory cortical map of the hand in both hemispheres causes a perceptual distortion (i.e., an overestimation) of the size of the participants' own hand (Experiments 1–3), which does not involve other body parts (i.e., the foot, Experiment 2). Instead, the stimulation of the inferior parietal lobule of both hemispheres does not affect the perception of the own body size (Experiment 4). These results highlight the role of the primary somatosensory cortex in the building up and updating of the metric of body parts: somatosensory cortical activity not only shapes our somatosensation, it also affects how we perceive the dimension of our body.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Somatosensory cortical representation of the body size

Giurgola

Pisoni

Maravita

et al. 2019

Human Brain Mapping

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“…The original pathway seems to be relatively spared as evidenced by the elicitation of sensations evoked on the amputated or insensate limb through stimulation of the peripheral nerve or somatosensory cortex. Furthermore, human imaging studies show that the representation of the missing limb, while noisier than that of an intact limb (as might be expected since it lacks its natural afferent input), is maintained in human amputees decades after amputation [36,60], as evidenced by a canonical functional hand layout [61] (Figure 3). Interestingly, hand topography is also preserved in individuals who have suffered brachial plexus injuries – which result in tearing the nerves – suggesting that the persistence of hand topography is SI does not depend on peripheral inputs.…”

Section: Stability Of Sensory Topographies In Adult Cortexmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Input from motor cortex in particular may serve to maintain somatosensory topographies. Indeed, the evidence for persistent topography described earlier (Figure 3) was obtained by asking amputees to produce individuated finger movements with their phantom hand [60,67], which led to somatotopically appropriate patterns of activity in SI despite the absence of peripheral input [61]. …”

Section: Neural Basis Of Stable Cortical Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stability of Sensory Topographies in Adult Cortex

Makin

Bensmaı̈a

2017

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

109

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Textbooks teach us that the removal of sensory input to sensory cortex, for example, following arm amputation, results in massive reorganisation in the adult brain. In this opinion article, we critically examine evidence for functional reorganisation of sensory cortical representations, focusing on the sequelae of arm amputation on somatosensory topographies. Based on literature from human and non-human primates, we conclude that the cortical representation of the limb remains remarkably stable despite the loss of its main peripheral input. Furthermore, the purportedly massive reorganisation results primarily from the formation or potentiation of new pathways in subcortical structures and does not produce novel functional sensory representations. We discuss the implications of the stability of sensory representations on the development of upper-limb neuroprostheses.

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“…Digit somatotopy is characterised in neuroimaging by two main principles: 1) digit selectivity, meaning separable regions show increased responsiveness to one digit compared to all other digits , and 2) inter-digit overlap, where neighbouring digits are more overlapping in their representation than non-neighbouring digits (Ejaz et al, 2015). The features of these digits maps have been extensively studied separately using either active (Kikkert et al, 2016;Wesselink et al, 2019) or passive tasks (Martuzzi, van der Zwaag, Farthouat, Gruetter, & Blanke, 2014;Sanchez-Panchuelo et al, 2010;Schweizer, Voit, & Frahm, 2008). Recent work by Berlot and colleagues (2019) provided a comparison between active and passive tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Similar somatotopy for active and passive digit representation in primary somatosensory cortex

Sanders

Wesselink

Dempsey-Jones

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Scientists traditionally use passive stimulation to examine organisational properties of the primary somatosensory cortex (SI). Recent research has, however, emphasised the close and bidirectional relationship between somatosensory and motor systems. This suggests active contributions (e.g., direct inputs from the motor system to SI) should also be considered when studying SI representations. Under such a framework, discrepant results are possible when different tasks are used to study the same underlying somatosensory representation. Here we examined whether SI hand representation is consistent when compared between active and passive tasks. Moreover, we ask whether this holds when task demands and stimulus properties are not directly matched. Using 7T fMRI, we examined three key digit representation features -spatial location, activity gradient profiles and multivariate representational structure. We show that although activity was increased overall in the active task, all key features of digit somatotopy were consistent over tasks, using both traditional univariate (activity-level) and multivariate (pattern structure) measurements. Despite overall comparability, when investigating fine-grained features of somatotopy using multivariate analysis, the active task was superior for individuating the representation across digits. We suggest that the information produced by an active task is more aligned with typical, ecologically relevant patterns of hand sensory input, resulting in more optimal SI activity patterns. Our findings validate the utilisation of active tasks for studying SI somatotopy.

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Revealing the neural fingerprints of a missing hand

Cited by 121 publications

References 59 publications

Somatosensory cortical representation of the body size

Somatosensory cortical representation of the body size

Stability of Sensory Topographies in Adult Cortex

Similar somatotopy for active and passive digit representation in primary somatosensory cortex

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