Going Against the Grain – Texture Orientation Affects Direction of Exploratory Movement

Sensory information is coded in space and in time. The organization of neuronal activity in space maintains straightforward relationships with the spatial organization of the perceived environment. In contrast, the temporal organization of neuronal activity is not trivially related to external features due to sensor motion. Still, the temporal organization shares similar principles across sensory modalities. Likewise, thalamocortical circuits exhibit common features across senses. Focusing on touch, vision, and audition, we review their shared coding principles and suggest that thalamocortical systems include circuits that allow analogous recoding mechanisms in all three senses. These thalamocortical circuits constitute oscillations-based phase-locked loops, that translate temporally-coded sensory information to rate-coded cortical signals, signals that can integrate information across sensory and motor modalities. The loop also allows predictive locking to the onset of future modulations of the sensory signal. The paper thus suggests a theoretical framework in which a common thalamocortical mechanism implements temporal demodulation across senses.

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Thalamocortical loops as temporal demodulators across senses

Ahissar

Nelinger

Assa

et al. 2023

Commun Biol

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Interdependences between finger movement direction and haptic perception of oriented textures

Lezkan

Drewing

2018

PLoS ONE

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Although the natural haptic perception of textures includes active finger movements, it is unclear how closely perception and movements are linked. Here we investigated this question using oriented textures. Textures that are composed of periodically repeating grooves have a clear orientation defined by the grooves. The direction of finger movement relative to texture orientation determines the availability of temporal cues to the spatial period of the texture. These cues are absent during movements directed in line with texture orientation, whereas movements orthogonal to texture orientation maximize the temporal frequency of stimulation. This may optimize temporal cues. In Experiment 1 we tested whether texture perception gets more precise the more orthogonal the movement direction is to the texture. We systematically varied the movement direction within a 2IFC spatial period discrimination task. As expected, perception was more precise (lower discrimination thresholds) when finger movements were directed closer towards the texture orthogonal as compared to in parallel to the texture. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether people adjust movement directions to the texture orthogonal in free exploration. We recorded movement directions during free exploration of standard and comparison gratings. The standard gratings were clearly oriented. The comparison gratings did not have a clear orientation defined by grooves. Participants adjusted movement directions to the texture orthogonal only for clearly oriented textures (standards). The adjustment to texture orthogonal was present in the final movement but not in the first movement. This suggests that movement adjustment is based on sensory signals for texture orientation that were gathered over the course of exploration. In Experiment 3 we assessed whether the perception of texture orientation and movement adjustments are based on shared sensory signals. We determined perceptual thresholds for orientation discrimination and computed ‘movometric’ thresholds from the stroke-by-stroke adjustment of movement direction. Perception and movements were influenced by a common factor, the spatial period, suggesting that the same sensory signals for texture orientation contribute to both. We conclude that people optimize texture perception by adjusting their movements in directions that maximize temporal cue frequency. Adjustments are performed on the basis of sensory signals that are also used for perception.

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Going Against the Grain – Texture Orientation Affects Direction of Exploratory Movement

Cited by 2 publications

References 20 publications

Thalamocortical loops as temporal demodulators across senses

Thalamocortical loops as temporal demodulators across senses

Interdependences between finger movement direction and haptic perception of oriented textures

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