Effects of passive tactile co-activation on median ulnar nerve representation in human S1

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Abstract
In animals simple passive co-activation causes a fusion and expansion of the involved cortical representations. We used passive tactile finger co-activation for 40 min to investigate cortical representational changes in the human somatosensory cortex. Magnetic source imaging revealed that the euclidean distance between median and ulnar nerve somatosensory evoked fields (SEF) was significantly reduced after application of 600 synchronous airpuff stimuli to the fingertips of four fingers. In the control experiment without co-activation no significant change in distance was observed. Perception threshold and spatial two-point discrimination were not affected by the synchronous stimulation. This is in contrast to blind three-finger Braille readers who frequently mislocalize stimuli applied to the reading fingers. This points to a lack of behavioural relevance or the short duration of co-activation.