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Somatosensory Cortex: Neural Coding of Motion

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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience

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Synonyms

Aperture problem; Tactile motion; Tactile motion integration

Definition

The tactile perception of motion involves the perception of movement of an object across the skin. Neural processing in the somatosensory cortex transforms the information originating from populations of afferents into a percept of the direction and speed of the tactile motion.

Detailed Description

Two Sources of Tactile Motion Information

The perception of tactile motion is thought to rely on two types of signals at the somatosensory periphery: the sequential activation of slowly adapting type 1 (SA1) (Johansson and Vallbo 1979) and rapidly adapting (RA) afferents (Kirman 1974; Sherrick and Rogers 1966) as an object moves across the skin and the activation of slowly adapting type 2 (SA2) afferents (Olausson et al. 2000) caused by friction-induced skin stretch resulting from motion (Olausson and Norrsell 1993).

Direction Tuning Emerged in the Primary Somatosensory Cortex

SA1 and RA afferents encode...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and University, No. 5, Fushing Street, 333, Taoyuan County, Taiwan

    Dr. Yu-Cheng Pei

Authors
  1. Dr. Yu-Cheng Pei
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yu-Cheng Pei .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

    Ranu Jung

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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Pei, YC. (2013). Somatosensory Cortex: Neural Coding of Motion. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_383-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_383-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6

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