Neurocomputation and Neuroimaging Unit, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Elife. 2019 Mar 29;8:e43410. doi: 10.7554/eLife.43410.
Research on somatosensory awareness has yielded highly diverse findings with putative neural correlates ranging from activity within somatosensory cortex to activation of widely distributed frontoparietal networks. Divergent results from previous studies may reside in cognitive processes that often coincide with stimulus awareness in experimental settings. To scrutinise the specific relevance of regions implied in the target detection network, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 27) on a novel somatosensory detection task that explicitly controls for stimulus uncertainty, behavioural relevance, overt reports, and motor responses. Using Bayesian Model Selection, we show that responses reflecting target detection are restricted to secondary somatosensory cortex, whereas activity in insular, cingulate, and motor regions is best explained in terms of stimulus uncertainty and overt reports. Our results emphasise the role of sensory-specific cortex for the emergence of perceptual awareness and dissect the contribution of the frontoparietal network to classical detection tasks.
躯体感觉意识的研究产生了高度多样化的发现，其潜在的神经关联从躯体感觉皮层内的活动到广泛分布的额顶网络的激活都有涉及。先前研究的不同结果可能存在于认知过程中，这些认知过程通常与实验环境中的刺激意识同时发生。为了仔细研究目标检测网络中所涉及的区域的具体相关性，我们在一项新的躯体感觉检测任务中使用了功能磁共振成像（n = 27），该任务明确控制了刺激不确定性、行为相关性、显性报告和运动反应。使用贝叶斯模型选择，我们表明反映目标检测的反应仅限于次级躯体感觉皮层，而岛叶、扣带和运动区域的活动则最好用刺激不确定性和显性报告来解释。我们的结果强调了感觉特异性皮层在知觉意识出现中的作用，并剖析了额顶网络对经典检测任务的贡献。
