2537 Brain activity in tactile object recognition by using f-MRI
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This paper is an investigation of the specific active cerebral regions of human in connection with the tactile sensation, especially tactile sensation of fabrics. First, psychophysical test of subjective rating of tactile sensation using 7 types of fabrics was conducted. Principal components of tactile sensation are analyzed to the subject rating results. It was confirmed that the most principal components are "roughness" and "temperature". Therefore, these two terms, together with the most commonly used "comfortable" in ones daily life, are chosen as the items in the following test. Based on the above results, active cerebral regions in connection with these decisive items are investigated using event-related functional magnetic resonance images (f-MRI). Forty healthy volunteers participated in the fMRI test. The test is composed of a randomly arranged sequence of tasks of judgment of "roughness", "temperature", and "comfortable" separated by resting. Activation maps, conjunctions across subjects, were compared between tasks. These results show that the correlation between "temperature" and "roughness" is low and the correlation between "roughness" and "comfortable" is high.
