期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2004
卷号：101
期号：34
页码：12724-12729
DOI：10.1073/pnas.0404884101
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The sensations of pressure, flutter, and vibration are psychophysically distinct tactile modalities produced by frequency-specific vibrotactile stimulation of different mechanoreceptors in the skin. The information coded by the different low-threshold mechanoreceptors are carried by anatomically and electrophysiologically distinct pathways that remain separate at least up to and including the input stage of primary somatosensory cortex (SI) in primates, area 3b. Little is known about the functional organization of tactile representation beyond that stage. By using intrinsic optical imaging methods to record from area 1, the second processing stage of SI, we present evidence that pressure, flutter, and vibratory stimuli activate spatially distinct cortical domains in area 1, further strengthening the foundation for modality-specific processing streams in SI. These modality domains exhibit an organization that is unlike the discontinuous modality maps in visual area V2 but more like the continuous visual orientation maps in V1. The results demonstrate that psychophysically distinct sensory modalities can have fundamentally different modes of cortical representation.
