Neural correlates of tactile simultaneity judgement: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

• Published in: Scientific reports 2019-12, Vol.9 (1), p.19481-13, Article 19481
• Main Authors: Kimura, Takahiro, Kadota, Hiroshi, Kuroda, Tsuyoshi, Funai, Tomomi D., Iwata, Makoto, Kochiyama, Takanori, Miyazaki, Makoto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 631/378/2649/1723; 631/378/3917; Analysis of Variance; Brain - diagnostic imaging; Brain Mapping - methods; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; multidisciplinary; Neostriatum; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Photic Stimulation; Psychophysics; Reaction Time - physiology; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Statistical analysis; Statistics; Tactile discrimination; Tactile stimuli; Temporal discrimination; Temporal perception
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-54323-7

Simultaneity judgement (SJ) is a temporal discrimination task in which the targets span an ultimately short time range (zero or not). Psychophysical studies suggest that SJ is adequate to probe the perceptual components of human time processing in pure form. Thus far, time-relevant neural correlates for tactile SJ are unclear. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of tactile SJ using tactile number judgement as a time-irrelevant control task. As our main result, we demonstrated that the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is an SJ-specific region. The right IPL was detected by both parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses, and its activation intensity fulfilled a strict statistical criterion. In addition, we observed that some left-dominant regions (e.g., the striatum) were specifically activated by successive stimuli during SJ. Meanwhile, no region was specifically activated by simultaneous stimuli during SJ. Accordingly, we infer that the neural process for tactile SJ is as follows: the striatum estimates the time interval between tactile stimuli; based on this interval, the right IPL discriminates the successiveness or simultaneity of the stimuli. Moreover, taking detailed behavioural results into account, we further discuss possible concurrent or alternative mechanisms that can explain the fMRI results.