Neural pathways in tactile object recognition

Abstract

TOR may utilize visual systems to access an internal object representation. The parietal cortices and inferior frontal regions may be involved in a concomitant lexical strategy of naming the object being examined. Frontal polar activation likely serves a role in visuospatial working memory or in recognizing unusual representations of objects. Overall, these findings suggest that TOR could involve a network of cortical regions subserving somatosensory, motor, visual, and, at times, lexical processing. The primary finding suggests that in this normal study population, the visual cortices may be involved in the topographic spatial processing of TOR.

Cross-modal associations between vision, touch, and audition influence visual search through top-down attention, not bottom-up capture

“…Consistent with this suggestion, studies have demonstrated that the visual cortex of blind individuals is activated during tasks such as Braille reading (Cohen et al, 1997;Sadato et al, 1996) and haptic object recognition (Amedi, Raz, Azulay, Malach, & Zohary, 2010). Moreover, the existence of networks between vision and touch in normally sighted individuals is supported by neuroimaging studies; visual areas have been shown to be activated during tactile orientation discrimination (Sathian & Zangaladze, 2002;Sathian, Zangaladze, Epstein, & Grafton, 1999), haptic object recognition (Amedi, Jacobson, Hendler, Malach, & Zohary, 2002;Amedi et al, 2010;Deibert, Kraut, Kremen, & Hart, 1999;James, Humphrey, Gati, Servos, Menon, & Goodale, 2002;Pietrini et al, 2004), and Braille reading in sighted subjects following 5 days of complete visual deprivation (Merabet et al, 2008). Furthermore, there is behavioral evidence for the influence of tactile inputs on visual perception.…”

Haptic perception: A tutorial

“…More specifically, judgments of the layout of touched objects and of stimulus motion on the skin have been found to activate areas in the dorsal visual pathway (macrospatial, Kitada et al, 2006;Sathian, Zangaladze, Hoffman, & Grafton, 1997;Stoesz et al, 2003;motion, R. Blake, Sobel, & James, 2004;Hagen, Zald, Thornton, & Pardo, 2002). However, haptic shape perception of 3-D objects activates the ventral visual pathway (e.g., Amedi, Jacobson, Hendler, Malach, & Zohary, 2002;Amedi, Malach, Hendler, Peled, & Zohary, 2001;Deibert, Kraut, Kremen, & Hart, 1999;James et al, 2002;James, Servos, Kilgour, Huh, & Lederman, 2006;Kitada, Johnsrude, Kochiyama, & Lederman, 2009;Malach et al, 1995;Pietrini et al, 2004;Reed, Shoham, & Halgren, 2004;Stoeckel et al, 2003;Zhang, Weisser, Stilla, Prather, & Sathian, 2004).…”

A neural model of how the brain represents and compares multi-digit numbers: spatial and categorical processes

“…Recent brain imaging data (Dehaene et al, 1996;Pesenti, Thioux, Seron, & De Volder, 2000;Pinel et al, 1999;Rickard et al, 2000) have identified the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) as a convergence zone during various numerical tasks with inputs and outputs representing different modalities. IPC and adjacent regions are known to play an important role in various spatial tasks, including visuomotor integration (Nishitani, Uutela, Shibasaki, & Hari, 1999), navigation (Maguire et al, 1998), location working memory (Courtney, Ungerleider, Keil, & Haxby, 1996), and tactile object recognition (Deibert et al, 1999). Spatial attentional deficits are also believed to be associated with IPC damage (Buck, Black, Behrmann, Caldwell, & Bronskill, 1997).…”