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Review
. 2015 Feb 1;113(3):684-7.
doi: 10.1152/jn.00670.2014. Epub 2014 Nov 12.

The vision of Hsiao on somatosensation

Martha Flanders  1 , John F Soechting  2
Affiliations
Review

The vision of Hsiao on somatosensation

Martha Flanders et al. J Neurophysiol. .

Abstract

The goal of this review is to start to consolidate and distill the substantial body of research that comprises the published work of the late Professor Steven S. Hsiao. The studies of Hsiao began by demonstrating the receptive field properties of somatosensory neurons, progressed to describing cortical feature selectivity, and then eventually elevated the field to hopes of tapping into natural neural codes with artificial somatosensory feedback. With ongoing analogies to contemporaneous studies in visual neuroscience, the research results and writings of Hsiao have provided the fields of haptics and somatosensory neurophysiology with the conceptual tools needed to allow profound progress. Specifically, Hsiao suggested that slowly adapting tactile form perception could be restored with cortical microstimulation, rapidly adapting slip reflexes should be relegated to low-level, hard-wired prosthetic components, and Pacinian-corpuscle spatiotemporal population responses could potentially be decoded/encoded to provide information about interactions of hands and hand-held instruments with external objects. Future studies will be guided by these insightful reports from Hsiao.

Keywords: Pacinian corpuscle; haptics; neuroprosthetics; somatosensory; touch.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
A: moving a raised letter (K) toward the distal end of a finger pad, from right to left in this figure, advances the stationary skin receptive field (dashed circle) from left to right across the letter. The receptive field was advanced by 1 mm every 20 ms (50 mm/s). B: the conventions of a spatial event plot (SEP) for the action potentials recorded at each location.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Example SEPs gathered while grids of 0.5-mm-diameter raised dots were scanned across the distal finger pad of an anesthetized macaque monkey. Row 1 shows the dot spacing (1.3–6.2 mm) of the stimuli. Rows 2 and 3 show that slowly adapting (SA) type 1 and rapidly adapting (RA) peripheral afferents can provide nearly isomorphic neural images of the pattern; row 4 suggests that Pacinian corpuscle (PC) afferents cannot. [Reproduced with permission from Connor et al. 1990, Fig. 4.]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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