TY - JOUR
T1 - Haptic interaction of touch and proprioception
T2 - Implications for neuroprosthetics
AU - Rincon-Gonzalez, Liliana
AU - Warren, Jay P.
AU - Meller, David M.
AU - Helms Tillery, Stephen
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 01, 2011; revised May 04, 2011 and June 07, 2011; accepted July 03, 2011. Date of current version October 07, 2011. This work was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, NIH/NINDS under Grant 5R01-NS063372-03/-02S1 and Grant 5R01-NS050256.
PY - 2011/10
Y1 - 2011/10
N2 - Somatosensation is divided into multiple discrete modalities that we think of separably: e.g., tactile, proprioceptive, and temperature sensation. However, in processes such as haptics, those modalities all interact. If one intended to artificially generate a sensation that could be used for stereognosis, for example, it would be crucial to understand these interactions. We are presently examining the relationship between tactile and proprioceptive modalities in this context. In this overview of some of our recent work, we show that signals that would normally be attributed to two of these systems separately, tactile contact and self-movement, interact both perceptually and physiologically in ways that complicate the understanding of haptic processing. In the first study described here, we show that a tactile illusion on the fingertips, the cutaneous rabbit effect, can be abolished by changing the posture of the fingers. We then discuss activity in primary somatosensory cortical neurons illustrating the interrelationship of tactile and postural signals. In this study, we used a robot-enhanced virtual environment to show that many neurons in primary somatosensory cortex with cutaneous receptive fields encode elements both of tactile contact and self-motion. We then show the results of studies examining the structure of the process which extracts the spatial location of the hand from proprioceptive signals. The structure of the spatial errors in these maps indicates that the proprioceptive-spatial map is stable but individually constructed. These seemingly disparate studies lead us to suggest that tactile sensation is encoded in a 2-D map, but one which undergoes continual dynamic modification by an underlying proprioceptive map. Understanding how the disparate signals that comprise the somatosensory system are processed to produce sensation is an important step in realizing the kind of seamless integration aspired to in neuroprosthetics.
AB - Somatosensation is divided into multiple discrete modalities that we think of separably: e.g., tactile, proprioceptive, and temperature sensation. However, in processes such as haptics, those modalities all interact. If one intended to artificially generate a sensation that could be used for stereognosis, for example, it would be crucial to understand these interactions. We are presently examining the relationship between tactile and proprioceptive modalities in this context. In this overview of some of our recent work, we show that signals that would normally be attributed to two of these systems separately, tactile contact and self-movement, interact both perceptually and physiologically in ways that complicate the understanding of haptic processing. In the first study described here, we show that a tactile illusion on the fingertips, the cutaneous rabbit effect, can be abolished by changing the posture of the fingers. We then discuss activity in primary somatosensory cortical neurons illustrating the interrelationship of tactile and postural signals. In this study, we used a robot-enhanced virtual environment to show that many neurons in primary somatosensory cortex with cutaneous receptive fields encode elements both of tactile contact and self-motion. We then show the results of studies examining the structure of the process which extracts the spatial location of the hand from proprioceptive signals. The structure of the spatial errors in these maps indicates that the proprioceptive-spatial map is stable but individually constructed. These seemingly disparate studies lead us to suggest that tactile sensation is encoded in a 2-D map, but one which undergoes continual dynamic modification by an underlying proprioceptive map. Understanding how the disparate signals that comprise the somatosensory system are processed to produce sensation is an important step in realizing the kind of seamless integration aspired to in neuroprosthetics.
KW - Muscle sense
KW - prosthetics
KW - somatosensation
KW - tactile
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U2 - 10.1109/TNSRE.2011.2166808
DO - 10.1109/TNSRE.2011.2166808
M3 - Article
C2 - 21984518
AN - SCOPUS:80054086675
SN - 1534-4320
VL - 19
SP - 490
EP - 500
JO - IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
IS - 5
M1 - 6035987
ER -