Neural substrates of visual and tactile integration about the object recognition by fMRI

Abstract

The visual and tactile perceptual integration is the important function for performing recognition of the object characteristic like size using vision information and tactile sense information concurrently. When judging an object simultaneously using vision and tactile sense, compatible sensation or incompatible sensation is between visual sensation and tactile sensation. In order to clarify the difference in the neural substrates for compatible sensation and incompatible sensation between visual sensation and tactile sensation, we used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in healthy volunteer 11 persons to identified human brain activation through cross-modal matching test about vision and tactile sense. The results suggested that BA1 provides prompt tactile perception information and BA3 provides remote tactile perception information for the object judgment; Left cerebellum participates to complicated cognitive activity more compared with right cerebellum; Right prefrontal cortex and PreSMA are deeply related to the judgment activities of a complicated repetition.