Somatic sensation of hand-object interactive movement is associated with activity in the left inferior parietal cortex - PubMed (original) (raw)

Randomized Controlled Trial

Somatic sensation of hand-object interactive movement is associated with activity in the left inferior parietal cortex

Eiichi Naito et al. J Neurosci. 2006.

Abstract

Manipulation of objects and tool-use are known to be controlled by a network of frontal motor and parietal areas. Here, we investigate which of these areas are associated with the somatic sensation of hand-object interactive movement using functional magnetic resonance imaging. To dissociate the sensation of movement from the motor control commands, we used a new kinesthetic illusion. Twelve blindfolded right-handed participants placed the palm of their right or left hand on an object (a ball). Simultaneously, we vibrated the tendon of the wrist extensor muscle. This elicited the illusion that the wrist is flexing and the touched object is also moving along with the hand (hand-object illusion). As controls, we vibrated the skin surface over the nearby bone, which does not elicit any illusions, or we vibrated the tendon when the hand did not touch the object, which only generates the illusory flexion of the hand. We found that the hand-object illusion specifically activated the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) (supramarginal gyrus and parietal operculum, including cytoarchitectonic areas ip1 and op1) and area 44. The left IPL was activated both during the hand-object illusions with the right and left hands, and the activity was greater than in the right corresponding parietal region, suggesting a dominant role of the left hemisphere. We conclude that the left IPL is involved in the somatic perception of hand-object interactive movement and suggest that the underlying mechanism is the somatic integration of internal information about the body and external information about the object.

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Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Experimental conditions. To elicit the illusions (top row), we vibrated the tendon of wrist extensor muscles (the ECU; TENDON) of the right or left hand when the palm of the hand rested on the lateral surface of a ball (left column; CONTACT) or when the hand did not touch the ball (right column; FREE). Note that the angle of the wrist was matched in these two situations. To control for the effect of skin vibration, we applied identical stimuli to the skin over the processus styloideus ulnae, which did not elicit any illusions (bottom row; CONTACT-BONE, FREE-BONE).

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Areas showing activity specifically related to the hand-object illusions [(CONTACT-TENDON vs CONTACT-BONE) vs (FREE-TENDON vs FREE-BONE)] and the cytoarchitectonic areas. The activations are superimposed on the normalized anatomical image of a subject. Pink sections (filled in a and open in b–f) correspond to the areas activated during the left hand-object illusion; light green sections (filled in a and open in c, d, and f) correspond to those active during the right hand-object illusion. Filled blue sections correspond to the most probable locations of cytoarchitectonic area 44 (light blue, ip1; white, ip2; yellow, op1). The dark green spots in a and c indicate the overlapping areas active during the right and left hand-object interaction.

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