Somatosensory activations during the observation of touch and a case of vision-touch synaesthesia.

By Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, D. Bristow, G. Bird, J. Ward, ChrisD . Frith. Brain : a journal of neurology, 2005

601 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this study, we describe a new form of synaesthesia in which visual perception of touch elicits conscious tactile experiences in the perceiver. We describe a female subject (C) for whom the observation of another person being touched is experienced as tactile stimulation on the equivalent part of C's own body. Apart from this clearly abnormal synesthetic experience, C is healthy and normal in every other way. In this study, we investigate whether C's 'mirrored touch' synesthetic experience is caused by overactivity in the neural system that responds to the observation of touch. A functional MRI experiment was designed to investigate the neural system involved in the perception of touch in a group of 12 non-synesthetic control subjects and in C. We investigated neural activity to the observation of touch to a human face or neck compared with the observation of touch to equivalent regions on an object. Furthermore, to investigate the somatosensory topography of the activations during observation of touch, we compared activations when observing a human face or neck being touched with activations when the subjects themselves were touched on their own face or neck. The results demonstrated that the somatosensory cortex was activated in the non-synesthetic subjects by the mere observation of touch and that this activation was somatotopically organized such that observation of touch to the face activated the head area of primary somatosensory cortex, whereas observation of touch to the neck did not. Moreover, in non-synesthetic subjects, the brain's mirror system-comprising premotor cortex, superior temporal sulcus and parietal cortex-was activated by the observation of touch to another human more than to an object. C's activation patterns differed in three ways from those of the non-synesthetic controls. First, activations in the somatosensory cortex were significantly higher in C when she observed touch. Secondly, an area in left premotor cortex was activated in C to a greater extent than in the non-synesthetic group. Thirdly, the anterior insula cortex bilaterally was activated in C, but there was no evidence of such activation in the non-synesthetic group. The results suggest that, in C, the mirror system for touch is overactive, above the threshold for conscious tactile perception.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2595808866fd504f59ebc2b24a43189448d4507

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Citations in the corpus

What Is It like to Feel Another’s Pain?* (2012, background): “, touch and pain), talk of sharing is not just loose talk (Wicker et al. 2003; Keysers et al. 2004; Singer et al. 2004; Blakemore et al. 2005).”
Shared Neural Circuits for Mentalizing about the Self and Others (2010, background): “The first system, coding for low-level embodied/ simulative representations, exists within frontal operculum/ ventral premotor cortex (FO/PMv) (Gazzola & Keysers, 2009; Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, & Keysers, 2006; Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004), somatosensory cortices (SI/SII) (Bl”
Perception of human motion. (2007, background): “Indeed, a correlate of this mirror system has been investigated in human observers (see review by Blakemore et al. 2005), including observers viewing PL animations (Tai et al. 2004), and there is some debate over the extent to which such a system could serve as a basis for social cognition (Jacob &…”
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (2009, background): “Rather, they are instructed to passively watch a scene or movie depicting a person expressing an emotion or being touched (Blakemore et al. 2005; Keysers et al. 2004; Singer et al. 2004, 2006; Wicker et al. 2003).”
Brain basis of human social interaction: from concepts to brain imaging. (2009, background): “Such evidence derives from MEG (5, 199) and scalp evoked potential (18) recordings, as well as from fMRI studies (12, 134).”
The Observation and Execution of Actions Share Motor and Somatosensory Voxels in all Tested Subjects: Single-Subject Analyses of Unsmoothed fMRI Data (2008, background): “... that SI and SII are modulated by the vision of actions (Avikainen et al. 2002; Rossi et al. 2002; Raos et al. 2004, 2007; Cross et al. 2006; Gazzola et al. 2006; Gazzola, Rizzolatti, et al. 2007; Grezes et al. 2003; Hasson et al. 2004; Oouchida et al. 2004; Mottonen et al. 2005; Molnar-Szakacs e”
Social cognition (2008, background): “In humans, mirror systems have been identified for emotion (Singer et al. 2004; Botvinick et al. 2005) and touch (Blakemore et al. 2005) as well as action (Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004).”
Intersensory binding across space and time: A tutorial review (2013, background): “This N260 component was colocalized with a lateralized blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response located in the posterior/medial region of the auditory cortex in the planum temporale (Bonath et al., 2007). Bruns and Röder (2010a) also substantiated the N260 as a signature for audiotactile spatial”
Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling. (2014, background): “Among somatosensory submodalities that may contribute to tactile hypersensitivity in autism (Blakemore et al., 2005), the role of CT afferents presents an intriguing hypothesis, with a dysfunction of such a system being a prime candidate for the tactile hypersensitivity associated with this…”
Social cognition in humans. (2007, neutral): “Areas in the brain associated with pain or touch are activated when we observe others in pain [45] or being touched [ 46 ].”
Flexibility and Stability in Sensory Processing Revealed Using Visual-to-Auditory Sensory Substitution (2014, background): “…where one sensory input carries information associated with another sensory input; for example, watching touch or lip reading (Calvert et al. 1997; Blakemore et al. 2005) or when this input conveys a special ecological, or task-specific meaning such as pup odor enhancing responses to pup’s cries…”
Understanding interpersonal action coordination: an fMRI study (2011, background): “Studies have shown that allowing a subject to observe a presentation of a tactile stimulus elicits increased activity in the somatosensory area (Blakemore et al. 2005; Keysers et al. 2004), and tactile prediction via the forward model is assumed to be represented in the somatosensory area (Gazzola…”
Habeas Corpus: The Sense of Ownership of One ' s Own Body (2007, background): “Even more surprisingly, a woman reported feeling tactile sensations on her own skin when observing another person being touched ( Blakemore et al. , 2005 ).”
The social brain? (2007, background): “Somatosensory brain regions are activated when we see someone else being touched (Keysers et al. 2004; Blakemore et al. 2005).”