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Title: Unconscious Touch Perception After Disruption of the Primary Somatosensory Cortex
Brain damage or disruption to the primary visual cortex sometimes produces blindsight, a striking condition in which patients lose the ability to consciously detect visual information yet retain the ability to discriminate some attributes without awareness. Although there have been few demonstrations of somatosensory equivalents of blindsight, the lesions that produce “numbsense,” in which patients can make accurate guesses about tactile information without awareness, have been rare and localized to different regions of the brain. Despite transient loss of tactile awareness in the contralateral hand after transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex but not TMS of a control site, 12 participants (six female) reliably performed at above-chance levels on a localization task. These results demonstrating TMS-induced numbsense implicate a parallel somatosensory pathway that processes the location of touch in the absence of awareness and highlight the importance of primary sensory cortices for conscious perception.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1755477 1358893 1561518 1137172
NSF-PAR ID:
10228308
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Psychological Science
Volume:
32
Issue:
4
ISSN:
0956-7976
Page Range / eLocation ID:
549 to 557
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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