Effects of stimulus-driven synchronization on sensory perception.docVIP

Behavioral and Brain Functions BioMedCentral Research Open Access Effects of stimulus-driven synchronization on sensory perception Mark Tommerdahl*, Vinay Tannan, Matt Zachek, Jameson K Holden and Oleg V Favorov Address: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA Email: Mark Tommerdahl* - tommerda@; Vinay Tannan - tannanv@; Matt Zachek - mzachek@; Jameson K Holden - jamesonholden@; Oleg V Favorov - favorov@ * Corresponding author Published: 4 December 2007 Received: 28 August 2007 Accepted: 4 December 2007 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2007, 3:61 doi:10.1186/1744-9081-3-61 This article is available from: /content/3/1/61 ? 2007 Tommerdahl et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: A subjects ability to differentiate the loci of two points on the skin depends on the stimulus-evoked pericolumnar lateral inhibitory interactions which increase the spatial contrast between regions of SI cortex that are activated by stimulus-evoked afferent drive. Nevertheless, there is very little known about the impact that neuronal interactions – such as those evoked by mechanical skin stimuli that project to and coordinate synchronized activity in adjacent and/or near-adjacent cortical columns – could have on sensory information processing. Methods: The temporal order judgment (TOJ) and temporal discriminative threshold (TDT) of 20 healthy adult subjects were assessed both in the absence and presence of concurrent conditions of tactile stimulation. These measures were obtained across a number of paired sites – two unilateral and one bilateral – and several conditions of adapting stimuli were delivere