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01-01-2012 | Research Article

Directional remapping in tactile inter-finger apparent motion: a motion aftereffect study

Authors: Scinob Kuroki, Junji Watanabe, Kunihiko Mabuchi, Susumu Tachi, Shin’ya Nishida

Published in: Experimental Brain Research | Issue 2/2012

Abstract

Tactile motion provides critical information for perception and manipulation of objects in touch. Perceived directions of tactile motion are primarily defined in the environmental coordinate, which means they change drastically with body posture even when the same skin sensors are stimulated. Despite the ecological importance of this perceptual constancy, the sensory processing underlying tactile directional remapping remains poorly understood. The present study psychophysically investigated the mechanisms underlying directional remapping in human tactile motion processing by examining whether finger posture modulates the direction of the tactile motion aftereffect (MAE) induced by inter-finger apparent motions. We introduced conflicts in the adaptation direction between somatotopic and environmental spaces by having participants change their finger posture between adaptation and test phases. In a critical condition, they touched stimulators with crossed index and middle fingers during adaptation but with uncrossed fingers during tests. Since the adaptation effect was incongruent between the somatotopic and environmental spaces, the direction of the MAE reflects the coordinate of tactile motion processing. The results demonstrated that the tactile MAE was induced in accordance with the motion direction determined by the environmental rather than the somatotopic space. In addition, it was found that though the physical adaptation of the test fingers was not changed, the tactile MAE disappeared when the adaptation stimuli were vertically aligned or when subjective motion perception was suppressed during adaptation. We also found that the tactile MAE, measured with our procedure, did not transfer across different hands, which implies that the observed MAEs mainly reflect neural adaptations occurring within sensor-specific, tactile-specific processing. The present findings provide a novel behavioral method to analyze the neural representation for directional remapping of tactile motion within tactile sensory processing in the human brain.

In vision, MAE occurs at multiple levels of processing (Nishida and Ashida 2000; Nishida and Sato 1995), and attentive tracking alone can induce a high-level MAE even with no directional biases in low-level motion adaptation signals (Culham et al. 2010). It remains unclear whether attentive tracking can also induce a tactile MAE in a similar way. To minimize the potential influence of attentive tracking on our tactile MAE, we instructed the participants not to track the adapting motion. Although it might be difficult for this procedure to completely prevent some participants from occasionally tracking the adapting stimuli, the lack of the MAE in the contralateral condition in Experiment 2, which examined a high-level MAE, might indicate that the effect of attentive tracking was negligible in our case, either because attentive tracking has no effect at least on the type of tactile MAE we measured, or attentive tracking during adaptation was effectively reduced by the instruction. Further investigations are needed on the relationship between attention and tactile MAEs.

The results remained the same even when the author’s data were excluded. The MAE magnitude was significantly different from zero in the uncrossed and crossed conditions [t(8) = 10.11, P < 0.001 and t(8) = 9.70, P < 0.001, respectively], but not in the vertically aligned (in Experiment 1), crossed + index (in Experiment 2), and contralateral (in Experiment 2) conditions [t(8) = 0.82, P > 0.1, ns; t(8) = 0.47, P > 0.1, ns; and t(8) = 0.20, P > 0.1, ns, respectively].

One might suspect that the reason why the average MAE magnitude of the vertically aligned condition was close to zero was not because the MAE magnitude was small, but because the MAE direction of MAE was inconsistent across participants. In disagreement with this possibility, however, the adaptation effect was significantly smaller for the vertically aligned condition than for the uncrossed condition even when the absolute (unsigned) shift magnitude was compared [t(9) = 5.89, P < 0.001, by paired t test].

Although we used the crossed posture during adaptation and the uncrossed posture in the test, it is possible in theory to test directional remapping by using the uncrossed posture during adaptation and the crossed posture in the test. In a preliminary experiment, we tried this finger condition, but the results did not show a decisive trend. This is at least in part because the crossed finger posture made direction judgments less accurate (Benedetti 1985; Sekine and Mogi 2009 see also subsidiary experiments), as hand crossing does (Azañón and Soto-Faraco 2008; Yamamoto and Kitazawa 2001; Shore et al. 2002). Psychometric functions became shallow and distorted (Yamamoto and Kitazawa 2001), and then, the estimation of the MAE from the shift of psychometric functions became less reliable.

Since motion intensity rating was close to “1” rather than “2” even for normal finger posture, one might consider that the apparent motions we presented were not strong. However, this may not be necessarily so, because the criterion to choose “2” was arbitrarily set by each participant. In addition, given a small variation in the magnitude of motion impression across trials in our experiment, some participants might use “1” to indicate the standard intensity of apparent motion presented in the session. Although the rating was not high, it is very unlikely that the apparent motion was not perceived at all for the first three conditions, since their motion intensity ratings were significantly higher than that for the crossed + index condition.

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Title: Directional remapping in tactile inter-finger apparent motion: a motion aftereffect study
Authors: Scinob Kuroki
Junji Watanabe
Kunihiko Mabuchi
Susumu Tachi
Shin’ya Nishida
Publication date: 01-01-2012
Publisher: Springer-Verlag
Published in: Experimental Brain Research / Issue 2/2012
Print ISSN: 0014-4819
Electronic ISSN: 1432-1106
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2936-0

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Directional remapping in tactile inter-finger apparent motion: a motion aftereffect study

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