Article
Neurosciences
Aurelie Brecier, Melodie Borel, Nadia Urbain, Luc J. Gentet
Summary: GABAergic inhibitory neurons play a crucial role in regulating cortical circuit activity during the sleep/wake cycle. This study investigated the activity dynamics of PV, VIP, and SST neurons in the somatosensory cortex of sleeping mice. The findings revealed that PV neurons were most active during both REM and NREM sleep, VIP neurons were most active during REM sleep, and the overall activity of SST neurons remained stable throughout the sleep/wake cycle. Furthermore, the study found that ongoing delta and theta oscillations influenced the activity of most neurons, except for SST neurons.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Sebastian M. Frank, Alexandra Otto, Gregor Volberg, Peter U. Tse, Takeo Watanabe, Mark W. Greenlee
Summary: This study demonstrates that tactile learning can transfer to untrained body parts that are coactivated with the trained body part. The researchers found that the transfer of tactile learning was greater from the trained foot to the untrained hand compared to the other way around. The results suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying tactile learning involve somatotopic representation in the primary somatosensory cortex.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Review
Neurosciences
Abhishek Banerjee, Bin A. Wang, Jasper Teutsch, Fritjof Helmchen, Burkhard Pleger
Summary: Evolution has shaped the sensory capacities of different species. Rodents rely heavily on the whisker-based somatosensory system for environmental exploration and navigation, while humans rely more on visual and auditory inputs. Recent research has found surprisingly similar processing rules for detecting tactile stimuli and rule learning across species. This article reviews how the brain utilizes these processing rules during tactile learning and discusses the challenges and relevance of cross-species research.
PROGRESS IN NEUROBIOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Immunology
Yosuke Danjo, Eiji Shigetomi, Yukiho J. Hirayama, Kenji Kobayashi, Tatsuya Ishikawa, Yugo Fukazawa, Keisuke Shibata, Kenta Takanashi, Bijay Parajuli, Youichi Shinozaki, Sun Kwang Kim, Junichi Nabekura, Schuichi Koizumi
Summary: The activation of astrocytes plays a crucial role in brain plasticity and the development of neurological disorders. The presence of mGluR5 in astrocytes, which is absent under normal conditions, is essential for regulating synaptic plasticity and neuronal activity, particularly in the somatosensory cortex.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Ryoki Sasaki, Sho Kojima, Naofumi Otsuru, Hirotake Yokota, Kei Saito, Hiroshi Shirozu, Hideaki Onishi
Summary: This study investigated the mechanisms of cortical connections in adult tactile perception and found that the connections within the somatosensory cortex and between different somatosensory cortices are related to tactile spatial acuity. This is the first study to demonstrate the functional support of specific cortical networks for tactile spatial acuity.
Article
Neurosciences
Michael Schaefer, Anja Kuehnel, Franziska Rumpel, Matti Gaertner
Summary: Giving and receiving touch are important social stimuli in daily life. Previous studies have shown that touch can influence altruistic behavior. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural mechanisms behind the Midas touch effect. The researchers found that touching the hand increased prosocial behavior, and this effect was associated with activity in the primary somatosensory cortex.
SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Biochemical Research Methods
Seong-Hwan Hwang, Doyoung Park, Somang Paeng, Sang Wan Lee, Sue-Hyun Lee, Hyoung F. Kim
Summary: In this study, a pneumatic tactile stimulus delivery system was developed to enable MRI studies of brain mechanisms for tactile processes through natural finger touch.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE METHODS
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Luke E. Miller, Cecile Fabio, Malika Azaroual, Dollyane Muret, Robert J. van Beers, Alessandro Farne, W. Pieter Medendorp
Summary: This study proposes that the somatosensory system may implement multilateration to decode touch location on the body by estimating the relative distance between afferent input and body part boundaries. A simple feed forward neural network was shown to be able to implement this computation, and the computational signature of multilateration was identified in psychophysical experiments.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging
Jinglong Wu, Chenyu Wang, Luyao Wang, Yutong Wang, Jiajia Yang, Tianyi Yan, Dingjie Suo, Li Wang, Xin Liu, Jian Zhang
Summary: This study investigates the characteristics of human finger population receptive fields (pRF) in the primary somatosensory cortex using a multichannel tactile stimulation device. The results show that the device has no effect on the image's signal-to-noise ratio and can accurately characterize the representation of the right-hand somatosensory system.
JOURNAL OF MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
(2022)
Article
Biochemical Research Methods
Mohammad Reza Keshtkaran, Andrew R. Sedler, Raeed H. Chowdhury, Raghav Tandon, Diya Basrai, Sarah L. Nguyen, Hansem Sohn, Mehrdad Jazayeri, Lee E. Miller, Chethan Pandarinath
Summary: AutoLFADS is a model-tuning framework that automatically generates high-performing autoencoding models on data from different brain areas and tasks.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Annika Reinersmann, Ian W. Skinner, Thomas Luecke, Nicola Massy-Westropp, Henrik Rudolf, G. Lorimer Moseley, Tasha R. Stanton
Summary: Contrary to expectations, tactile anisotropy was preserved bilaterally in CRPS, and the magnitude of anisotropic perception bias was comparable between groups. Hand perception was distorted in CRPS but not related to the magnitude of anisotropy or bias.
Article
Neurosciences
Luyao Wang, Zhilin Zhang, Tomohisa Okada, Chunlin Li, Duanduan Chen, Shintaro Funahashi, Jinglong Wu, Tianyi Yan
Summary: This study investigated the somatotopic map of the undominant hand using a Bayesian population receptive field (pRF) model, revealing an orderly representation between digits with elliptical pRF shapes and varying width changes across dimensions for different digits. These results provide new insights into neural mechanisms in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and allow for further exploration of somatosensory information processing and disease-related reorganization.
Article
Neurosciences
Michael Schaefer, Marcel Joch, Nikolas Rother
Summary: The concept of empathy describes our capacity to understand the emotions and intentions of others and to relate to our conspecifics. Recent studies in neuroscience suggest a role of the somatosensory cortices for empathy, with findings indicating a positive association between trait empathy and tactile acuity performance.
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Review
Neurosciences
Ding-lan Tang, Caroline A. A. Niziolek, Benjamin Parrell
Summary: In the past 30 years, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has gained popularity as a tool for modulating human somatosensation. However, the effects of different stimulation types on different subdomains of somatosensation have not been systematically compared. This study aims to review the existing literature on TMS and provide a comprehensive understanding of its role in modulating human somatosensation.
EXPERIMENTAL BRAIN RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Esra Al, Fivos Iliopoulos, Vadim V. Nikulin, Arno Villringer
Summary: Our perception of the external world is influenced by internal bodily signals, including the timing of stimulation along the cardiac cycle and fluctuations of heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) amplitudes. These internal signals affect somatosensory perception and neural processing. Additionally, increased conscious perception seems to be associated with HEP fluctuations in certain brain regions, while engagement in somatosensory tasks leads to decreased HEP amplitudes.
Article
Zoology
Grace Capshaw, Andrew P. Foss-Grant, Konstantin Hartmann, Juan F. Sehuanes, Cynthia F. Moss
BIOACOUSTICS-THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ANIMAL SOUND AND ITS RECORDING
(2020)
Article
Biology
Chao Yu, Jinhong Luo, Melville Wohlgemuth, Cynthia F. Moss
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
(2019)
Review
Chemistry, Analytical
Clarice Anna Diebold, Angeles Salles, Cynthia F. Moss
Article
Biology
Te K. Jones, Cynthia F. Moss
Summary: This study investigates how the combination of visual and auditory cues influences the obstacle avoidance behaviors of insectivorous big brown bats. The results show that when both visual and auditory cues are present, bats have a heightened avoidance response to obstacles. Flight and echolocation behaviors do not significantly vary under different obstacle conditions, indicating that these factors do not determine a bat's response to obstacle stimulus type.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Biochemical Research Methods
Lakshitha P. Wijesinghe, Melville J. Wohlgemuth, Richard H. Y. So, Jochen Triesch, Cynthia F. Moss, Bertram E. Shi
Summary: The study demonstrates that big brown bats utilize active head movements during echolocation, resulting in improved target localization accuracy and reduced time required for localization.
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Sangwook Park, Angeles Salles, Kathryne Allen, Cynthia F. Moss, Mounya Elhilali
Summary: Bats provide a powerful mammalian model for exploring the neural representation of complex sounds, and research shows that the spectro-temporal tuning of their inferior colliculus neurons is optimized to match the natural statistics of conspecific vocalizations. The artificial neural network replicates the tuning properties of both biological and artificial neurons, suggesting the presence of nonlinear, sparse, and complex constraints in the neural representation of auditory midbrain. The network also allows for the inference of neural mechanisms underlying the processing of natural sounds in constructing the auditory scene.
Article
Neurosciences
Kathryne M. Allen, Jennifer Lawlor, Angeles Salles, Cynthia F. Moss
Summary: The study explores comparative work on mammalian superior colliculus and non-mammalian optic tectum, highlighting the role of the SC in multisensory integration and motor initiation.
Emphasis is placed on recent studies that consider ethological context and natural behaviors, advancing knowledge of the SC as a site of sensory processing and motor control in diverse species.
CURRENT OPINION IN NEUROBIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Madison M. Weinberg, Nazrawit A. Retta, Katrina M. Schrode, Laurel A. Screven, Jamie L. Peterson, Cynthia F. Moss, Susanne Sterbing, Amanda M. Lauer
Summary: Researchers found profound deafness and extensive cochlear damage in some big brown bats, which exhibited anomalies in behavioral sonar tracking experiments or lacked neural responses to acoustic stimulation. This study also revealed abnormal or absent auditory brainstem responses in these bats, with histological analyses showing extensive loss of sensory cells in the cochlea.
Article
Neurosciences
Chao Yu, Cynthia F. Moss
Summary: This study investigates the responses of bat hippocampal neurons to sonar signals and found that a subset of neurons show response selectivity to the duration of single echolocation calls, but not to call-echo delay. Population analysis revealed the encoding of call duration and sequence identity. These findings suggest new directions for studying auditory coding in the mammalian hippocampus.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Jackson Rossborough, Angeles Salles, Laura Stidsholt, Peter T. Madsen, Cynthia F. Moss, Larry F. Hoffman
Summary: This study found that head stabilization behavior in echolocating bats optimizes sonar gaze and environmental interrogation via echolocation, as supported by free-flying Egyptian fruit bats experiments. Head and body accelerations during flight were uncoupled, with sonar emissions occurring most often during wing downstroke and head stabilization.
JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY A-NEUROETHOLOGY SENSORY NEURAL AND BEHAVIORAL PHYSIOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Biology
Te K. Jones, Kathryne M. Allen, Cynthia F. Moss
Summary: Animals relying on electrolocation and echolocation for navigation and prey detection face challenges of interference and eavesdropping, but effectively counter these threats through adaptive behaviors.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Chemistry, Analytical
Brittney L. Boublil, Clarice Anna Diebold, Cynthia F. Moss
Summary: Biological hair and hair-like sensors are diverse across the animal kingdom and play important roles in animal behaviors, supporting survival in various ecological niches. The shared functional properties of hair and hair-like structures among invertebrates and vertebrates can inspire advancements in artificial systems, such as robotics, by highlighting biological sensors.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Huimin Wang, Yuxuan Zhou, Huanhuan Li, Cynthia F. Moss, Xingxing Li, Jinhong Luo
Summary: This study investigates the audiovocal control in the echolocation of bats and finds that it shares the same computational principles as human speech. Through experiments and mathematical modeling, the researchers confirm their hypothesis and provide insights into the shared mechanisms between humans and other mammals in audiovocal control.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Review
Biology
Cynthia F. Moss, Sara Torres Ortiz, Magnus Wahlberg
Summary: Journal of Experimental Biology has a long history of reporting research discoveries on animal echolocation. Over 1100 species of bats and 70 species of toothed whales rely on echolocation to operate in different environments. The physics of sound transmission in air and underwater pose constraints on the production, detection, and localization of sonar signals, leading to differences in response times and prey detection methods. Similarities and differences in animal sonar behaviors underwater and in air present open research questions for further exploration.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Angeles Salles, Clarice Anna Diebold, Cynthia F. Moss
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2020)