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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on March 19, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(12):2878-2891; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm015
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Tactile Hyperacuity Thresholds Correlate with Finger Maps in Primary Somatosensory Cortex (S1)

Robert O. Duncan1 and Geoffrey M. Boynton2

1 Hamilton Glaucoma Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0946, USA, 2 The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA

Address correspondence to Dr Robert O. Duncan, PhD, Hamilton Glaucoma Center, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0946, USA. Email: rduncan{at}eyecenter.ucsd.edu.

Behavioral tactile discrimination thresholds were compared with functional magnetic resonance imaging measurements of cortical finger representations within primary somatosensory cortex (S1) for 10 human subjects to determine whether cortical magnification in S1 could account for the variation in tactile hyperacuity thresholds of the fingers. Across 10 subjects, the increase in tactile thresholds from the index finger to the little finger correlated with the decrease in cortical representation across fingers in S1. Additionally, representations of the fingers within S1, in Brodmann areas 3b and 1, were also correlated with the thresholds. These results suggest that tactile hyperacuity is largely determined by the cortical representation of the fingers in S1.

Key Words: digit • fMRI • hand • skin • somatic • touch

Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by National Institute of Health grants EY07028-02 and EY12925.


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