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Rapid learning and unlearning of predicted sensory delays in self-generated touch

View ORCID ProfileKonstantina Kilteni, Christian Houborg, View ORCID ProfileH. Henrik Ehrsson
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/653923
Konstantina Kilteni
1Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solnavägen 9, 17165 Stockholm, Sweden
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  • For correspondence: konstantina.kilteni@ki.se
Christian Houborg
1Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solnavägen 9, 17165 Stockholm, Sweden
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H. Henrik Ehrsson
1Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solnavägen 9, 17165 Stockholm, Sweden
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Abstract

Self-generated touch feels less intense and less ticklish than identical externally generated touch. This somatosensory attenuation occurs because the brain predicts the tactile consequences of our self-generated movements. To produce attenuation, the tactile predictions need to be time-locked to the movement, but how the brain maintains this temporal tuning remains unknown. Using a bimanual self-touch paradigm, we demonstrate that people can rapidly unlearn to attenuate touch immediately after their movement and learn to attenuate delayed touch instead, after repeated exposure to a systematic delay between the movement and the resulting touch. The magnitudes of the unlearning and learning effects are correlated and dependent on the number of trials that participants have been exposed to. We further show that delayed touches feel less ticklish and non-delayed touches more ticklish after exposure to the systematic delay. These findings demonstrate that the attenuation of self-generated touch is adaptive.

  • somatosensory attenuation
  • sensorimotor delays
  • prediction errors
  • forward models
  • tickling
  • motor learning
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 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 31, 2019.
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Rapid learning and unlearning of predicted sensory delays in self-generated touch
Konstantina Kilteni, Christian Houborg, H. Henrik Ehrsson
bioRxiv 653923; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/653923
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Rapid learning and unlearning of predicted sensory delays in self-generated touch
Konstantina Kilteni, Christian Houborg, H. Henrik Ehrsson
bioRxiv 653923; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/653923

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