Perceptually relevant remapping of human somatotopy in 24 hours

Experience-dependent reorganisation of functional maps in the cerebral cortex is well described in the primary sensory cortices. However, there is relatively little evidence for such cortical reorganisation over the short-term. Using human somatosensory cortex as a model, we investigated the effects of a 24 hr gluing manipulation in which the right index and right middle fingers (digits 2 and 3) were adjoined with surgical glue. Somatotopic representations, assessed with two 7 tesla fMRI protocols, revealed rapid off-target reorganisation in the non-manipulated fingers following gluing, with the representation of the ring finger (digit 4) shifted towards the little finger (digit 5) and away from the middle finger (digit 3). These shifts were also evident in two behavioural tasks conducted in an independent cohort, showing reduced sensitivity for discriminating the temporal order of stimuli to the ring and little fingers, and increased substitution errors across this pair on a speeded reaction time task. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.17280.001

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  eLife

• Publication date

  2016-12-30

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7554/eLife.17280PMID 28035900PMCID 5241114
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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