Topic: nociceptive domains

The population coding account of pain proposes that a distributed network of neural activity across both nociceptive and non-nociceptive domains drives our experience of thermosensation and pain (Coghill, 2020; Fardo et al., 2020). Recent, pioneering work in mice shows that distinct neuronal population codes for cold and warm exist in the posterior insula cortex (Vestergaard et al., 2023). In this study we used fMRI to model the pattern of response associated with innocuous and noxious thermal stimuli, to determine whether similar population receptive fields (PRFs) for temperature and pain exi