Differential Interaction of BOLD Responses to Simultaneous Finger Stimulation in Subareas of Human Primary Somatosensory Cortex (SI)

Suppressive interaction of neural activity within the human somatosensory system following simultaneous stimulation of finger pairs has been described in electrophysiological studies (Hsieh et al 1995; Hoechstetter et al. 2001); SI and SII responses to simultaneous stimulation of two fingers appeared to be consistently smaller than the sum of the corresponding separate responses, indicating suppressive interaction between finger representations. In this fMRI study we investigated whether the BOLD responses to simultaneous stimulation of adjacent fingers exhibit a non-linear interference behavior and whether the…