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The Journal of Neuroscience, January 14, 2004, 24(2):442-446; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3731-03.2004

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BRIEF COMMUNICATION
Improvement and Decline in Tactile Discrimination Behavior after Cortical Plasticity Induced by Passive Tactile Coactivation

Amra Hodzic,^1,2 Ralf Veit,¹ Ahmed A. Karim,^1,2 Michael Erb,³ and Ben Godde^1,4

¹Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, D-72074 Tübingen, Germany, ²International Max Planck Research School, Graduate School of Neural and Behavioral Sciences, D-72074 Tübingen, Germany, ³Department of Neuroradiology, Section on Experimental Magnetic Resonance of the Central Nervous System, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany, and ⁴Department of Neurology, University Hospital, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany

Perceptual learning can be induced by passive tactile coactivation without attention or reinforcement. We used functional MRI (fMRI) and psychophysics to investigate in detail the specificity of this type of learning for different tactile discrimination tasks and the underlying cortical reorganization. We found that a few hours of Hebbian coactivation evoked a significant increase of primary (SI) and secondary (SII) somatosensory cortical areas representing the stimulated body parts. The amount of plastic changes was strongly correlated with improvement in spatial discrimination performance. However, in the same subjects, frequency discrimination was impaired after coactivation, indicating that even maladaptive processes can be induced by intense passive sensory stimulation.

Key words: functional MRI; psychophysics; perceptual learning; input statistics; somatosensory cortex; human

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Received Aug 11, 2003; revised November 10, 2003; accepted November 17, 2003.

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