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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on September 14, 2005
Cerebral Cortex 2006 16(6):819-826; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj025
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Subarea-specific Suppressive Interaction in the BOLD Responses to Simultaneous Finger Stimulation in Human Primary Somatosensory Cortex: Evidence for Increasing Rostral-to-caudal Convergence

Jan Ruben, Thomas Krause, Birol Taskin, Felix Blankenburg, Matthias Moosmann and Arno Villringer

Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin NeuroImaging Center and Department of Neurology, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Address correspondence to Jan Ruben, Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin NeuroImaging Center and Department of Neurology, Schumannstrasse 20/21, 10117 Berlin, Germany. Email: jan.ruben{at}charite.de.

In the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) of non-human primates, receptive field properties have been shown to differ between its subareas with increasing convergence in areas 1 and 2 as compared with area 3b. In this study, we searched for a similar functional organization of human SI. We performed fMRI in healthy subjects during separate or simultaneous electrical stimulation of the second and third finger of the right hand. Activation patterns in response to stimulation of single fingers reflected the somatotopical arrangement within the hand area of SI. Somatotopy was more clear-cut in area 3b as compared with areas 1 and 2. The response to simultaneous stimulation was considerably smaller than the summed responses to separate stimulation of each finger alone, pointing to a suppressive interaction effect. A region-of-interest analysis in the representational areas of the second and third finger revealed subarea-specific differential suppressive interaction with an increase along the rostral-caudal axis (areas 3b, 1 and 2: 26, 32.7 and 42.2%, respectively). These findings on differences in the topographic as well as functional organization between subareas of SI support the notion of increasing convergence and integration from area 3b to areas 1 and 2 in human subjects.

Key Words: electrical stimulation • fMRI • SI • somatotopy • suppressice interaction


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