SELF-TOUCH · Perception in Action: Neural Dynamics of Sensorimotor Interactions in Touch

Perception in Action: Neural Dynamics of Sensorimotor Interactions in Touch

The brain has an extraordinary ability to swiftly distinguish between self-generated and externally generated sensations. The key to this ability is the brain’s strategy of predicting future sensory information in real-time. During self-touch, before your body parts even make contact, information about when and where the touch will occur is precisely predicted from your motor command. This prediction allows the brain to safely ignore sensations that are caused by your own actions. The predictive attenuation of self-generated sensations is referred to as sensory attenuation (SA) and it’s thought to be the reason why you do not relentlessly startle or tickle yourself when you often touch your skin. Current neurobiological theories propose that when prediction mechanisms fail it can have powerful consequences for our perception, from mild perceptual disturbances to more extreme hallucinations and delusions that are characteristic of psychotic episodes in schizophrenia. Thus, accurately predicting the future allows the brain to construct a coherent representation of the present. Predicting the sensory consequences of our actions requires temporally dynamic neural mechanisms that modulate the perception of our touch with millisecond-level precision; however, very little is known about how these mechanisms operate in the brain. Predicted tactile sensations are likely signaled via specific neural oscillations, which are known to subserve brain connectivity, within a well-defined network. A proper understanding of the temporal dynamics underlying the prediction of self-generated sensations could reveal how perceptual disturbances manifest in psychosis and may be important for the development of biomarkers for early intervention in the prodromal phase of schizophrenia. The “SELF-TOUCH” project builds upon well-established models of motor control with systematic behavioural and neuroimaging experiments benefitting from millisecond-level temporal precision. The project’s objectives are: Objective 1: To elucidate how the brain dynamically predicts tactile sensations during the time-course of self-touch. Objective 2: To investigate how the brain treats violations of these predictions. Objective 3: To examine how these predictive mechanisms operate in relation to trait schizotypy.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз