Topic: thermosensation

Spatial summation in thermosensation refers to the integration of multiple sensory signals, resulting in the perception of a unique sensation. The relationship between stimulus size and perceived intensity is sub-additive, suggesting an influence of lateral inhibition, a process in which adjacent neurons inhibit each other. We investigated the role of spatial summation and lateral inhibition in thermosensation using computational modeling. We devised a perceptual decision-making task where thermal stimuli were applied to 16 participants' forearms, with temperatures increasing or decreasing fro

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