RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Creating a neuroprosthesis for active tactile exploration of textures
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 594994
DO 10.1101/594994
A1 O’Doherty, Joseph E.
A1 Shokur, Solaiman
A1 Medina, Leonel E.
A1 Lebedev, Mikhail A.
A1 Nicolelis, Miguel A. L.
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/04/04/594994.abstract
AB Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) can produce percepts that mimic somatic sensation and thus has potential as an approach to sensorize prosthetic limbs. However, it is not known whether ICMS could recreate active texture exploration—the ability to infer information about object texture by using one’s fingertips to scan a surface. Here we show that ICMS of S1 can convey information about the spatial frequencies of invisible virtual gratings through a process of active tactile exploration. Two rhesus monkeys scanned pairs of visually identical screen objects with the fingertip of a hand avatar, controlled via a joystick and later via a brain-machine interface, to find the one with denser virtual gratings. The gratings consisted of evenly spaced ridges that were signaled through ICMS pulses generated when the avatar’s fingertip crossed each ridge. The monkeys learned to interpret these ICMS patterns evoked by the interplay of their voluntary movements and the virtual textures of each object. Discrimination accuracy across a range of grating densities followed Weber’s law of just-noticeable differences (JND), a finding that matches normal cutaneous sensation. Moreover, one monkey developed an active scanning strategy where avatar velocity was integrated with the ICMS pulses to interpret the texture information. We propose that this approach could equip upper-limb neuroprostheses with direct access to texture features acquired during active exploration of natural objects.