Lokale taktile Kodierung in der Fingerbeere des Menschen

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Cornelius Schwarz
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Kognitive, systemische und Verhaltensneurobiologie
• Förderung: Förderung von 2016 bis 2024
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 280069124

• Erstellungsjahr: 2024

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

In this project we studied a novel hypothesis about tactile sensing and perception that we established based on previous work in the rat whisker-related tactile system, transferring it to the human tactile fingertip system. Based on our finding that frictional movements, consisting on short-lasting stick-slip movements, carry texture information, we hypothesized that the tactile system, rather than averaging across the vibrotactile signal to calculate ‘intensity’ and ‘best frequency’, performs event-detection and -extraction, followed by waveform analysis used to be able to infer instantaneously about the identity of a touched tactile object (texture). In the course of application for the renewal the corona pandemic hit and stopped the planned experimental work on human participants for more than a year. With the loss of time during the pandemic, we decided to focus the project fully on psychophysics and combine it with MEG/EEG recording. In the end of the funding period we were able to start the study of sensorimotor interactions. We established three novel behavioural paradigms and established their combination with MEG/EEG recordings. We were able to confirm findings from our rodent work in humans. Humans were shown to be able to discriminate kinematic pulse shapes while they have great difficulty to use pulse rate (of identical pulses). As these findings break with long-standing tradition in thinking about tactile processing, it received great attention and surprise, and sometimes resistance, in the field of primate tactile perception. Given the dominant paradigms of ‘intensity’ and ‘frequency’ coding this result laid outside main stream thinking only a few years ago. We started combining human psychophysics with EEG recordings, investigating S1 activity in response to isolated short indentation pulses. Preliminary results showed a tendency (matching our previous results in rodents) that local coding has reflections in activity that likely is located in primary somatosensory cortex. Finally, using MEG recordings we studied an important precondition to study temporally local coding, the effect of movement on tactile flow called sensory gating. We found that a tactile stimulus bound to movement in terms of a contingent cue-response pair is not prone to sensory gating.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

• A Tactile Virtual Reality for the Study of Active Somatosensation. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 14.
  Bhattacharjee, Arindam; Kajal, Diljit Singh; Patrono, Alessandra; Li, Hegner Yiwen; Zampini, Massimiliano; Schwarz, Cornelius & Braun, Christoph
  
• Mapping the Brain-Wide Network Effects by Optogenetic Activation of the Corpus Callosum. Cerebral Cortex, 30(11), 5885-5898.
  Chen, Yi; Sobczak, Filip; Pais-Roldán, Patricia; Schwarz, Cornelius; Koretsky, Alan P. & Yu, Xin
  
• Propofol Affects Cortico-Hippocampal Interactions via β3 Subunit-Containing GABAA Receptors. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21(16), 5844.
  Kreuzer, Matthias; Butovas, Sergejus; García, Paul S.; Schneider, Gerhard; Schwarz, Cornelius; Rudolph, Uwe; Antkowiak, Bernd & Drexler, Berthold
  
• Conveyance of texture signals along a rat whisker. Scientific Reports, 11(1).
  Oladazimi, Maysam; Putelat, Thibaut; Szalai, Robert; Noda, Kentaro; Shimoyama, Isao; Champneys, Alan & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Functional analysis of information rates conveyed by rat whisker-related trigeminal nuclei neurons. Journal of Neurophysiology, 125(4), 1517-1531.
  Laturnus, Sophie; Hoffmann, Adrian; Chakrabarti, Shubhodeep & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Humans Use a Temporally Local Code for Vibrotactile Perception. eneuro, 8(6), ENEURO.0263-21.2021.
  Bhattacharjee, Arindam; Braun, Christoph & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Adaptive Whisking in Mice. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 15.
  Chakrabarti, Shubhodeep; Nambiar, Jithin & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Local Neuronal Responses to Intracortical Microstimulation in Rats' Barrel Cortex Are Dependent on Behavioral Context. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 16.
  Butovas, Sergejus & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Temporally Local Tactile Codes Can Be Stored in Working Memory. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 16.
  Bhattacharjee, Arindam & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Activity in Barrel Cortex Related to Trace Eyeblink Conditioning. eneuro, 10(8), ENEURO.0206-23.2023.
  Silva-Prieto, May-Li; Hofmann, Julian I. & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Discerning state estimation and sensory gating, two presumptive predictive signals in mouse barrel cortex. openRxiv.
  Gupta, Kalpana; Chowdhury, Ritu Roy; Chakrabarti, Shubhodeep & Schwarz, Cornelius
  
• Decoding neural responses of stimulus-response mapping during a tactile-motor task. Systems Neuroscience Symposium, Tübingen.
  Sometti, D., Greco, A. Schwarz, C. & Braun, C.
  
• Human tactile discrimination of pulse shape is possible without preadaptation. Journal of Neurophysiology, 132(6), 1747-1755.
  Bhattacharjee, Arindam; Antony, Harry & Schwarz, Cornelius