Spinal cord injury affects the interplay between visual and sensorimotor representations of the body

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Abstract

The brain integrates multiple sensory inputs, including somatosensory and visual inputs, to produce a representation of the body. Spinal cord injury (SCI) interrupts the communication between brain and body and the effects of this deafferentation on body representation are poorly understood. We investigated whether the relative weight of somatosensory and visual frames of reference for body representation is altered in individuals with incomplete or complete SCI (affecting lower limbs’ somatosensation), with respect to controls. To study the influence of afferent somatosensory information on body representation, participants verbally judged the laterality of rotated images of feet, hands, and whole-bodies (mental rotation task) in two different postures (participants’ body parts were hidden from view). We found that (i) complete SCI disrupts the influence of postural changes on the representation of the deafferented body parts (feet, but not hands) and (ii) regardless of posture, whole-body representation progressively deteriorates proportionally to SCI completeness. These results demonstrate that the cortical representation of the body is dynamic, responsive, and adaptable to contingent conditions, in that the role of somatosensation is altered and partially compensated with a change in the relative weight of somatosensory versus visual bodily representations.

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Most cited references 47

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Despite extensive evidence for regions of human visual cortex that respond selectively to faces, few studies have considered the cortical representation of the appearance of the rest of the human body. We present a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies revealing substantial evidence for a distinct cortical region in humans that responds selectively to images of the human body, as compared with a wide range of control stimuli. This region was found in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex in all subjects tested and apparently reflects a specialized neural system for the visual perception of the human body.

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A self-produced tactile stimulus is perceived as less ticklish than the same stimulus generated externally. We used fMRI to examine neural responses when subjects experienced a tactile stimulus that was either self-produced or externally produced. More activity was found in somatosensory cortex when the stimulus was externally produced. In the cerebellum, less activity was associated with a movement that generated a tactile stimulus than with a movement that did not. This difference suggests that the cerebellum is involved in predicting the specific sensory consequences of movements, providing the signal that is used to cancel the sensory response to self-generated stimulation.

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The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics.

Margaret Wilson, Günther Knoblich (2005)

Perceiving other people's behaviors activates imitative motor plans in the perceiver, but there is disagreement as to the function of this activation. In contrast to other recent proposals (e.g., that it subserves overt imitation, identification and understanding of actions, or working memory), here it is argued that imitative motor activation feeds back into the perceptual processing of conspecifics' behaviors, generating top-down expectations and predictions of the unfolding action. Furthermore, this account incorporates recent ideas about emulators in the brain-mental simulations that run in parallel to the external events they simulate-to provide a mechanism by which motoric involvement could contribute to perception. Evidence from a variety of literatures is brought to bear to support this account of perceiving human body movement.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Rep

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Rep

Title: Scientific Reports

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2045-2322

Publication date (Electronic): 04 February 2016

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 6

Electronic Location Identifier: 20144

Affiliations

[1 ]Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Department of Health Sciences and Technology , ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

[2 ]The Laboratory for Investigative Neurophysiology (The LINE), Department of Radiology and Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University Hospital Center (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UNIL) , Lausanne, Switzerland

[3 ]Spinal Cord Injury Center, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zurich , Zurich, Switzerland

[4 ]University College Physiotherapy Thim van der Laan , Landquart, Switzerland

[5 ]Department of Business Economics, Health and Social Care, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland , Landquart/Manno, Switzerland

[6 ]Department of Brain Repair and Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London , London, UK

[7 ]Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London , London, UK

[8 ]Department of Neurophysics, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive, and Brain Sciences , Leipzig, Germany

Author notes

[a ] ionta.silvio@ 123456gmail.com

[*]

These authors contributed equally to this work.

[†]

These Authors Jointly supervised this work.

Article

Publisher Item ID: srep20144

DOI: 10.1038/srep20144

PMC ID: 4740737

PubMed ID: 26842303

SO-VID: dbcdeb02-5df5-48a2-87d3-091d47b4d7f4

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

History

Date received : 17 July 2015

Date accepted : 30 December 2015

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Spinal cord injury affects the interplay between visual and sensorimotor representations of the body

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Most cited references 47

A cortical area selective for visual processing of the human body.

Central cancellation of self-produced tickle sensation.

The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics.

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