Biology subjects

King, C. D.

Publications and source records attributed to King, C. D..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

DISSOCIATION BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SELF-REPORTED PAIN INTENSITY AND UNDERLYING BRAIN ACTIVATION

Pain is a uniquely individual experience. Previous studies have highlighted changes in brain activation and morphology associated with inter- and intra-individual pain perception. In this study we sought to characterize brain mechanisms associated with individual differences in pain in a large sample of healthy participants (N = 101). Pain ratings varied widely across individuals. Moreover, individuals reported changes in pain evoked by small differences in stimulus intensity in a manner congruent with their pain sensitivity, further supporting the utility of subjective reporting as a measure of the true individual experience. However, brain activation related to inter-individual differences in pain was not detected, despite clear sensitivity of the BOLD signal to small differences in noxious stimulus intensities within individuals. These findings raise questions about the utility of fMRI as an objective measure to infer reported pain intensity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Evidence for a system in the auditory periphery that may contribute to linking sounds and images in space

Eye movements alter the relationship between the visual and auditory spatial scenes. Signals related to eye movements affect the brains auditory pathways from the ear through auditory cortex and beyond, but how these signals might contribute to computing the locations of sounds with respect to the visual scene is poorly understood. Here, we evaluated the information contained in the signals observed at the earliest processing stage, eye movement-related eardrum oscillations (EMREOs). We report that human EMREOs carry information about both horizontal and vertical eye displacement as well as initial/final eye position. We conclude that all of the information necessary to contribute to a suitable coordinate transformation of auditory spatial cues into a common reference frame with visual information is present in this signal. We hypothesize that the underlying mechanism causing EMREOs could impose a transfer function on any incoming sound signal, which could permit subsequent processing stages to compute the positions of sounds in relation to the visual scene.

neuroscience↗