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Finger representations in primary somatosensory cortex are modulated during vibrotactile working memory

Finn Rabe, Sanne Kikkert, Nicole Wenderoth
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.29.466459
Finn Rabe
1Neural Control of Movement Laboratory, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
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  • For correspondence: rabef@ethz.ch nicole.wenderoth@hest.ethz.ch
Sanne Kikkert
1Neural Control of Movement Laboratory, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
2Spinal Cord Injury Center, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
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Nicole Wenderoth
1Neural Control of Movement Laboratory, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
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  • For correspondence: rabef@ethz.ch nicole.wenderoth@hest.ethz.ch
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ABSTRACT

It is well-established that vibrotactile stimulations elicit Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses in somatotopically organized brain regions. Whether these somatotopic maps are modulated by working memory (WM) is still unknown. In our WM experiment, participants had to compare frequencies that were separated by a delay period. Vibrotactile stimuli were sequentially applied to either their right index or little finger. Using functional MRI, we investigated whether vibrotactile WM modulated neural activity in primary somatosensory (S1), an area that is known to contain individual finger representations. Our mass-univariate results revealed the well-described network of brain regions involved in WM. Interestingly, our mass-univariate results did not demonstrate S1 to be part of this network. However, when we parametrically modulated the time-binned regressors in our GLM we found that the delay activity in S1 and secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) was reflected in a U-shaped manner. Using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), an analysis technique that is more sensitive to subtle activity differences, we found finger-specific patterns of activation in the S1 hand area during the WM delay period. These results indicate that processes underlying WM modulate finger-specific representations during our discrimination task.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted November 01, 2021.
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Finger representations in primary somatosensory cortex are modulated during vibrotactile working memory
Finn Rabe, Sanne Kikkert, Nicole Wenderoth
bioRxiv 2021.10.29.466459; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.29.466459
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Finger representations in primary somatosensory cortex are modulated during vibrotactile working memory
Finn Rabe, Sanne Kikkert, Nicole Wenderoth
bioRxiv 2021.10.29.466459; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.29.466459

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