scholarly journals Hand size underestimation grows during childhood

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucilla Cardinali ◽  
Andrea Serino ◽  
Monica Gori
Keyword(s):  
Motor Behavior ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Hand Size ◽  
Infancy And Childhood ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Sensory Maps ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Cortical body size representations are distorted in the adult, from low-level motor and sensory maps to higher levels multisensory and cognitive representations. Little is known about how such representations are built and evolve during infancy and childhood. Here we investigated how hand size is represented in typically developing children aged 6 to 10. Participants were asked to estimate their hand size using two different sensory modalities (visual or haptic). We found a distortion (underestimation) already present in the youngest children. Crucially, such distortion increases with age and regardless of the sensory modality used to access the representation. Finally, underestimation is specific for the body as no bias was found for object estimation. This study suggests that the brain does not keep up with the natural body growth. However, since motor behavior nor perception were impaired, the distortion seems functional and/or compensated for, for proper interaction with the external environment.

Triadic body representations in the human cerebral cortex and peripheral nerves

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noriaki Kanayama ◽  
Kentaro Hiromitsu
Keyword(s):  
Peripheral Nerves ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Body Representation ◽  
Neural System ◽  
The Body ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
The Brain

Is the body reducible to neural representation in the brain? There is some evidence that the brain contributes to the functioning of the body from neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and lesion studies. Well-known dyadic taxonomy of the body schema and the body image (hereafter BSBI) is based primarily on the evidence in brain-damaged patients. Although there is a growing consensus that the BSBI exists, there is little agreement on the dyadic taxonomy because it is not a concrete and common concept across various research fields. This chapter tries to investigate the body representation in the cortex and nervous system in terms of sensory modality and psychological function using two different approaches. The first approach is to review the neurological evidence and cortical area which is related to body representation, regardless of the BSBI, and then to reconsider how we postulate the BSBI in our brain. It can be considered that our body representation could be constructed by the whole of the neural system, including the cortex and peripheral nerves. The second approach is to revisit the BSBI conception from the viewpoint of recent neuropsychology and propose three types of body representation: body schema, body structural description, and body semantics. This triadic taxonomy is considered consistent with the cortical networks based on the evidence of bodily disorders due to brain lesions. These two approaches allow to reconsider the BSBI more carefully and deeply and to give us the possibility that the body representation could be underpinned with the network in the brain.

Microelectrode study of dorsal spinocerebellar tract

1962 ◽  
Vol 203 (5) ◽  
pp. 799-802 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. T. Kitai ◽  
F. Morin
Keyword(s):  
Hind Limb ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Joint Movement ◽  
Ipsilateral Side ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Spinocerebellar Tract ◽  
Stimulation Of

The dorsal spinocerebellar tract (DSCT) at C-1, C-2, and the lower medulla level was studied with microelectrodes in lightly anesthetized cats. All responses were obtained from the stimulation of the ipsilateral side of the body. The sensory modalities activating the total of 242 fibers studied were touch (53%), pressure (31%), touch and pressure (2%), and joint movement (14%). Responses to touch were more numerous for the forelimb, while responses to pressure and to joint movement were more numerous for the hind limb. Regardless of modalities the trunk was significantly less represented in the DSCT than the limbs. Tactile and pressure peripheral fields were restricted (i.e., a few hairs of a paw) and large (i.e., more than one segment of a limb). The ratio of restricted to large fields for touch was 7 to 1, and for pressure 5 to 1. Fibers activated by joint movements adjusted their frequency of firing to the degree of displacement and to the rate of the movement. There was no evidence for a separate anatomical segregation of fibers responding to a single sensory modality.

scholarly journals Interoception: the forgotten modality in perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts

2018 ◽  
Vol 373 (1752) ◽  
pp. 20170143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Connell ◽  
Dermot Lynott ◽  
Briony Banks
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Perceptual Modalities ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Taste And Smell ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Emotion Concepts

Conceptual representations are perceptually grounded, but when investigating which perceptual modalities are involved, researchers have typically restricted their consideration to vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. However, there is another major modality of perceptual information that is distinct from these traditional five senses; that is, interoception, or sensations inside the body. In this paper, we use megastudy data (modality-specific ratings of perceptual strength for over 32 000 words) to explore how interoceptive information contributes to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. We report how interoceptive strength captures a distinct form of perceptual experience across the abstract–concrete spectrum, but is markedly more important to abstract concepts (e.g. hungry , serenity ) than to concrete concepts (e.g. capacity , rainy ). In particular, interoception dominates emotion concepts, especially negative emotions relating to fear and sadness , moreso than other concepts of equivalent abstractness and valence. Finally, we examine whether interoceptive strength represents valuable information in conceptual content by investigating its role in concreteness effects in word recognition, and find that it enhances semantic facilitation over and above the traditional five sensory modalities. Overall, these findings suggest that interoception has comparable status to other modalities in contributing to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

scholarly journals Beat Detection Recruits the Visual Cortex in Early Blind Subjects

Life ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 296
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Araneda ◽  
Sandra Silva Moura ◽  
Laurence Dricot ◽  
Anne G. De Volder
Keyword(s):  
Brain Plasticity ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Rhythm Perception ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Beat Detection ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Early Blindness

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, here we monitored the brain activity in 12 early blind subjects and 12 blindfolded control subjects, matched for age, gender and musical experience, during a beat detection task. Subjects were required to discriminate regular (“beat”) from irregular (“no beat”) rhythmic sequences composed of sounds or vibrotactile stimulations. In both sensory modalities, the brain activity differences between the two groups involved heteromodal brain regions including parietal and frontal cortical areas and occipital brain areas, that were recruited in the early blind group only. Accordingly, early blindness induced brain plasticity changes in the cerebral pathways involved in rhythm perception, with a participation of the visually deprived occipital brain areas whatever the sensory modality for input. We conclude that the visually deprived cortex switches its input modality from vision to audition and vibrotactile sense to perform this temporal processing task, supporting the concept of a metamodal, multisensory organization of this cortex.

scholarly journals Modality-specific and multisensory mechanisms of spatial attention and expectation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Zuanazzi ◽  
Uta Noppeney
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Behavioral Effects ◽  
Signal Probability ◽  
Task Relevance ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Primary Modality

AbstractIn our natural environment, the brain needs to combine signals from multiple sensory modalities into a coherent percept. While spatial attention guides perceptual decisions by prioritizing processing of signals that are task-relevant, spatial expectations encode the probability of signals over space. Previous studies have shown that behavioral effects of spatial attention generalize across sensory modalities. However, because they manipulated spatial attention as signal probability over space, these studies could not dissociate attention and expectation or assess their interaction.In two experiments, we orthogonally manipulated spatial attention (i.e., task-relevance) and expectation (i.e., signal probability) selectively in one sensory modality (i.e., primary modality) (experiment 1: audition, experiment 2: vision) and assessed their effects on primary and secondary sensory modalities in which attention and expectation were held constant.Our results show behavioral effects of spatial attention that are comparable for audition and vision as primary modalities; yet, signal probabilities were learnt more slowly in audition, so that spatial expectations were formed later in audition than vision. Critically, when these differences in learning between audition and vision were accounted for, both spatial attention and expectation affected responses more strongly in the primary modality in which they were manipulated, and generalized to the secondary modality only in an attenuated fashion. Collectively, our results suggest that both spatial attention and expectation rely on modality-specific and multisensory mechanisms.

scholarly journals Body models in humans, animals, and robots: mechanisms and plasticity

2021 ◽  
pp. 152-180
Author(s):  
Matej Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Internal Representation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Representations ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Combining Information

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth or failures, or using tools. The key foundation is an internal representation of the body that the agent—human, animal, or robot—has developed. In the biological realm, evidence has been accumulating in diverse disciplines, giving rise to the concepts of body image, body schema, and others. In robotics, a model of the robot is an indispensable component that enables to control the machine. This chapter compares the character of body representations in biology with their robotic counterparts and relates that to the differences in performance observed. Conclusions are drawn about how robots can inform the biological sciences dealing with body representations and which of the features of the ‘body in the brain’ should be transferred to robots, giving rise to more adaptive and resilient self-calibrating machines.

scholarly journals Body Representation in Anorexia Nervosa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anouk Keizer ◽  
Manja Engel
Keyword(s):  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Body Size ◽  
Body Representation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Size Perception ◽  
Tactile Stimuli ◽  
Body Experiences ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Multisensory Information ◽  
The Brain

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder that mainly affects young women. One of the most striking symptoms of this disorder is the distorted experience of body size and shape. Patients are by definition underweight, but experience and perceive their body as bigger than it in reality is. This body representation disturbance has fascinated scientists for many decades, leading to a rich and diverse body of literature on this topic. Research shows that AN patients do not only think that their body is bigger than reality, and visually perceive it as such, but that other sensory modalities also play an important role in oversized body experiences. Patients for example have an altered (enlarged) size perception of tactile stimuli, and move their body as if it is larger than it actually is. Moreover, patients with AN appear to process and integrate multisensory information differently than healthy individuals, especially in relation to body size. This leads to the conclusion that the representation of the size of the body in the brain is enlarged. This conclusion has important implications for the treatment of body representation disturbances in AN. Traditionally treatment of AN is very cognitive in nature, it is possible however that changed cognitions with respect to body size experiences do not lead to actual changes in metric representations of body size stored in the brain. Recently a few studies have been published in which a multisensory approach in treatment of body representation disturbance in AN has been found to be effective in treating this symptom of AN.

scholarly journals The “amphi”-brains of amphipods: New insights from the neuroanatomy ofParhyale hawaiensis(Dana, 1853)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christin Wittfoth ◽  
Steffen Harzsch ◽  
Carsten Wolff ◽  
Andy Sombke
Keyword(s):  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Projection Neuron ◽  
The Body ◽  
Laser Scanning Microscopy ◽  
Central Complex ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Marine Animal ◽  
Developmental Studies ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACTBackgroundOver the last years, the amphipod crustaceanParhyale hawaiensishas developed into an attractive marine animal model for evolutionary developmental studies that offers several advantages over existing experimental organisms. It is easy to rear in laboratory conditions with embryos available year-round and amenable to numerous kinds of embryological and functional genetic manipulations. However, beyond these developmental and genetic analyses, research on the architecture of its nervous system is fragmentary. In order to provide a first neuroanatomical atlas of the brain, we investigatedP. hawaiensisusing immunohistochemical labelings combined with laser-scanning microscopy, X-ray microcomputed tomography, histological sectioning and 3D reconstructions.ResultsAs in most amphipod crustaceans, the brain is dorsally bent out of the body axis with downward oriented lateral hemispheres of the protocerebrum. It comprises almost all prominent neuropils that are part of the suggested ground pattern of malacostracan crustaceans (except the lobula plate and projection neuron tract neuropil). Beyond a general uniformity of these neuropils, the brain ofP. hawaiensisis characterized by a modified lamina (first order visual neuropil) and, compared to other Amphipoda, an elaborated central complex. The lamina displays a chambered appearance that, in the light of a recent analysis on photoreceptor projections inP. hawaiensis, corresponds to specialized photoreceptor terminals. The presence of a poorly differentiated hemiellipsoid body is indicated and critically discussed.ConclusionsAlthough amphipod brains show a general uniformity, when compared with each other, there is also a certain degree of variability in architecture and size of different neuropils. In contrast to other amphipods, the brain ofP. hawaiensisdoes not display any striking modifications or bias towards one particular sensory modality. Thus, we conclude that its brain may represent a common type of an amphipod brain.

Thalamocortical Interactions for Sensory Processing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose M. Alonso ◽  
Harvey A. Swadlow
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Main Stream ◽  
Axon Terminals ◽  
Sensory Maps ◽  
Corticothalamic Feedback ◽  
The Brain ◽  
High Firing ◽  
Thalamocortical Pathway

The thalamocortical pathway is the main route of sensory information to the cerebral cortex. Vision, touch, hearing, taste, and balance all depend on the integrity of this pathway that connects the thalamic structures receiving sensory input with the cortical areas specialized in each sensory modality. Only the ancient sense of smell is independent of the thalamus, gaining access to cortex through more anterior routes. While the thalamocortical pathway targets different layers of the cerebral cortex, its main stream projects to the middle layers and has axon terminals that are dense, spatially restricted, and highly specific in their connections. The remarkable specificity of these thalamocortical connections allows for a precise reconstruction of the sensory dimensions that need to be most finely sampled, such as spatial acuity in vision and sound frequency in hearing. The thalamic axon terminals also segregate topographically according to their stimulus preferences, providing a simple principle to build cortical sensory maps: neighboring values in sensory space are represented by neighboring points within the cortex. Thalamocortical processing is not static. It is continuously modulated by the brain stem and corticothalamic feedback based on the level of attention and alertness, and during sleep or general anesthesia. When alert, visual thalamic responses become stronger, more reliable, more sustained, more effective at sampling fast changes in the scene, and more linearly related to the stimulus. The high firing rates of the alert state make thalamocortical synapses chronically depressed and excitatory synaptic potentials less dependent on temporal history, improving even further the linear relation between stimulus and response. In turn, when alertness wanes, the thalamus reduces its firing rate, and starts generating spike bursts that drive large postsynaptic responses and keep the cortex responsive to sudden stimulus changes.

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