“School of Cognitive Sciences”
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| Paper IPM / Cognitive Sciences / 7644 |
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The somatosensory system is vulnerable to large amounts of distorting noise. But how does the central nervous system distinguish the peripheral inputs which carry information to the brain from that which does not posses information.
To address this question we studied the effect of electrical stimulation of the median nerve on tactile spatial frequency perception in healthy subjects and Parkinson?s disease patients.
Subjects were categorized in two groups (healthy and PD patients) and were asked to report if a test TFP(tactile frequency pattern) was the same as the reference TFP given to the other hand. In each case stimulation was present or absent on the median nerve of the hand holding the test pattern. We observed no impairment of tactile performance in the presence of electrical stimulation of the median nerve. This result together with a previous work on direct stimulation of somatosensory relay nucleus of the thalamus (Abbassian et al 2001) in which the same result of no impairment of tactile discrimination task was observed suggest a high degree of noise tolerancy to exist in the somatosensory pathway.
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