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Cooperative processing in primary somatosensory cortex and posterior parietal cortex during tactile working memory
Author(s) -
Ku Yixuan,
Zhao Di,
Bodner Mark,
Zhou YongDi
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.12950
Subject(s) - somatosensory system , working memory , posterior parietal cortex , tactile stimuli , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , transcranial magnetic stimulation , stimulus modality , sensory stimulation therapy , sensory system , tactile discrimination , neuroscience , functional magnetic resonance imaging , audiology , stimulation , cognitive psychology , cognition , medicine
Abstract In the present study, causal roles of both the primary somatosensory cortex ( SI ) and the posterior parietal cortex ( PPC ) were investigated in a tactile unimodal working memory ( WM ) task. Individual magnetic resonance imaging‐based single‐pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (sp TMS ) was applied, respectively, to the left SI (ipsilateral to tactile stimuli), right SI (contralateral to tactile stimuli) and right PPC (contralateral to tactile stimuli), while human participants were performing a tactile‐tactile unimodal delayed matching‐to‐sample task. The time points of sp TMS were 300, 600 and 900 ms after the onset of the tactile sample stimulus (duration: 200 ms). Compared with ipsilateral SI , application of sp TMS over either contralateral SI or contralateral PPC at those time points significantly impaired the accuracy of task performance. Meanwhile, the deterioration in accuracy did not vary with the stimulating time points. Together, these results indicate that the tactile information is processed cooperatively by SI and PPC in the same hemisphere, starting from the early delay of the tactile unimodal WM task. This pattern of processing of tactile information is different from the pattern in tactile‐visual cross‐modal WM . In a tactile‐visual cross‐modal WM task, SI and PPC contribute to the processing sequentially, suggesting a process of sensory information transfer during the early delay between modalities.