Neural Correlates of Tactile Temporal-Order Judgment in Humans: an fMRI Study

Abstract

Little is known about the neuronal mechanisms underlying the temporal ordering of tactile signals. We examined the brain regions involved in judgments of the temporal order of successive taps delivered to both hands. Participants received identical stimuli while engaging in 2 different tasks: Judging the temporal order and judging the numerosity of points of tactile stimulation. Comparisons of the functional magnetic resonance imaging data obtained during the 2 tasks revealed regions that were more strongly activated with the judgments of the temporal order than with the judgments of numerosity under both arms-uncrossed and -crossed conditions: The bilateral premotor cortices, the bilateral middle frontal gyri, the bilateral inferior parietal cortices and supramarginal gyri, and the bilateral posterior part of the superior and middle temporal gyri. Stronger activation was found in some of these areas that implicated for remapping tactile stimuli to spatial coordinates after the participants crossed their arms. The activation in the perisylvian areas overlapped with the human visual-motion-sensitive areas in the posterior part. Based on these results, we propose that the temporal order of tactile signals is determined by combining spatial representations of stimuli in the parietal and prefrontal cortices with representations of "motion" or "changes" in the multisensory perisylvian cortex.

Flexibly weighted integration of tactile reference frames

“…Similarly, spatial judgments about the numerosity of pins lifted to induce two tactile stimuli, one applied to each hand, were not influenced by posture (Takahashi et al, 2012). In contrast, in our secondary tasks, crossing effects emerged for temporal as well as for spatial judgments about the stimuli's vibration types.…”

“…Finally, response accuracy in the secondary task was again influenced by posture, that is, a crossing effect emerged in both tasks. Notably, in previous studies, a crossing effect was not reported in similar tasks (Roberts and Humphreys, 2008;Takahashi et al, 2012).…”

Temporal-Order Judgment of Audiovisual Events Involves Network Activity Between Parietal and Prefrontal Cortices

“…Bernasconi et al (2010aBernasconi et al ( , 2010b) demonstrated the importance of activity in the posterior sylvian regions in auditory TOJ by investigating auditory-evoked potentials. Recently, brain regions involved in judgments of temporal order of two tactile stimuli were examined (Takahashi et al, 2013), and authors purposed that the temporal order of tactile signals could be determined by combining spatial representations of stimuli in the parietal and prefrontal cortices (Macaluso and Driver, 2005).…”

Hand position-dependent modulation of errors in vibrotactile temporal order judgments: the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation to the human posterior parietal cortex

“…Figure 2 shows the resulting reconstructed stimulation sites over the superior parietal lobule in the left and right PPC. These sites are in close proximity to regions shown to be activated by the behavioral task (Takahashi et al 2013) and to the sites used in several TMS studies in which the PPC was targeted (e.g., Della-Maggiore et al 2004; Vesia et al 2008).

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“…Each of these studies demonstrated that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) showed greater activity associated with the remapping process when the arms were in a crossed posture (Lloyd et al 2003; Takahashi et al 2013; Wada et al 2012). The current study sought to determine the functional necessity of the PPC involvement by using single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily disrupt neural processing in either the right or left PPC, while participants performed the vibrotactile TOJ task with the hands in either an uncrossed or crossed configuration.…”