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Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 10, 3032-3044, Copyright © 1990 by Society for Neuroscience
Frequency discrimination in the sense of flutter: psychophysical measurements correlated with postcentral events in behaving monkeys
VB Mountcastle, MA Steinmetz and R Romo
Philip Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology, Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205.
The capacities of humans and monkeys to discriminate between the
frequencies of mechanical sinusoids delivered to the glabrous skin of the
hand have been measured in psychophysical experiments. The 2 primates have
similar capacities; they make discriminations with Weber fractions that
change little over the frequency range from 20 to 200 Hz. The
discriminatory capacities are similar whether stimuli are received
passively or acquired actively. Combined experiments have been made in
monkeys in which the electrical signs of the activity of quickly adapting
(QA) and slowly adapting (SA) neurons of postcentral areas 3b and 1 were
recorded, both in the working state as the animal made discriminations and
in the irrelevant state in which the stimuli did not guide behavior. The
neuronal responses were analyzed in terms of discharge rates, periodicities
in the neuronal discharges, and harmonic contents. It was shown that
discriminatory capacity depends upon the period lengths in the sets of
periodically entrained activity evoked by stimuli readily discriminated,
and not upon the small differences in rates of discharge evoked by those
stimuli. The periodicities were shown by harmonic analysis to be sharply
limited to stimulus frequencies. Low-frequency stimuli evoke periodicities
at the second and third harmonics in some neurons, in addition to strongly
periodic signals at the fundamental frequency of the stimuli. Their
presence does not appear to interfere with frequency discrimination.
Neuronal responses recorded in the stimulus-irrelevant state were not
distinguishable from those recorded as monkeys made discriminations. The
responses of SA neurons, recorded under similar conditions, resembled those
of QA neurons in almost every feature, but reasons are given for concluding
that the SA system plays no role in frequency discrimination in the sense
of flutter.
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