Tactile priming modulates the activation of the fronto-parietal circuit during tactile angle match and non-match processing: an fMRI study

Abstract

The repetition of a stimulus task reduces the neural activity within certain cortical regions responsible for working memory (WM) processing. Although previous evidence has shown that repeated vibrotactile stimuli reduce the activation in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, whether the repeated tactile spatial stimuli triggered the priming effect correlated with the same cortical region remains unclear. Therefore, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a delayed match-to-sample task to investigate the contributions of the priming effect to tactile spatial WM processing. Fourteen healthy volunteers were asked to encode three tactile angle stimuli during the encoding phase and one tactile angle stimulus during the recognition phase. Then, they answered whether the last angle stimulus was presented during the encoding phase. As expected, both the Match and Non-Match tasks activated a similar cerebral network. The critical new finding was decreased brain activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and bilateral medial frontal gyri (mFG) for the match task compared to the Non-Match task. Therefore, we suggest that the tactile priming engaged repetition suppression mechanisms during tactile angle matching, and this process decreased the activation of the fronto-parietal circuit, including IFG, mFG and PPC.

Functional Connectivity Evoked by Orofacial Tactile Perception of Velocity

“…Additionally, the results of our previous study indicated that a velocity of 5 cm/s evoked the most extensive brain activation (Custead et al, 2017), indicating that there were sufficient data from three runs for the lowest temporal density of pneumotactile stimulation (5 cm/s) to evoke cortical activation. For 25-and 65-cm/s velocities, the higher temporal density of air-pulse stimulation did not elicit more BOLD responses in the brain, suggesting that adaptation or repetition-suppressing processes may play a role (Hollins et al, 1991;Popescu et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2014;Custead et al, 2017). Additionally, the 65-cm/s velocity exceeded the optimal range of velocity for the face and was processed differently in higher-order cortical levels of cortex in an animal study (Darian-Smith et al, 1984).…”

“…Furthermore, neuroimaging studies also indicated that there are different cortical representations for different tactile stimuli in humans (e.g., location, type of motion, direction, velocity, etc.) (Reed et al, 2004;Miyamoto et al, 2006;Backlund Wasling et al, 2008;Eickhoff et al, 2008;Bjornsdotter et al, 2009;Moulton et al, 2009;Avivi-Arber et al, 2011;Grabski et al, 2012;Huang et al, 2012;Khoshnejad et al, 2014;Yang et al, 2014;Custead et al, 2015Custead et al, , 2017Hwang et al, 2017;Oh et al, 2017;Yeon et al, 2017).…”

Investigation of alpha band of the electroencephalogram before and after a task of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation

“…In the investigation of the cortical area factor before and after the task, the results showed RP increase of the alpha band at both moments, being more evident in the Fz derivation in all the analyzed groups in relation to the other derivations, however, it should be emphasized that this increase was higher in G2, especially before the task. This may be explained due to fact that this region of the cortex, more precisely the dorsomedial PFC, is related to working memory ( Raschle et al, 2015 ), which is understood as the individual’s cognitive ability to temporarily keep information about a certain action in the mind, as well as to serve as a guide for decision-making and future motor actions ( Yang et al, 2014 ).…”

Different activation signatures in the primary sensorimotor and higher-level regions for haptic three-dimensional curved surface exploration

“…is known to bidirectionally connect to the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and to the premotor cortex (PMC) during both haptic and tactile object processing (Eickhoff et al, 2010(Eickhoff et al, , 2008Rajaei et al, 2018;Sathian et al, 2011;Yang et al, 2017Yang et al, , 2014Yu et al, 2018b). Although the precise contributions of each area have not yet been established, the sub-regions, including the anterior part of the superior parietal lobule (SPL, areas 5 and 7) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL, area 40) of the PPC, have long been associated with object local and global features processing itself (Sathian, 2016).…”