BACKGROUND Acupuncture has been shown to reduce pain, and acupuncture-induced sensation may be important for this analgesia. In addition, cognitive coping strategies can influence sensory perception. However, the role of coping strategy on acupuncture modulation of pain and sensory thresholds, and the association between acupuncture sensation and these modulatory effects, is currently unknown. ...

Natural sensory input shapes both structure and function of developing neurons, but how early experience-driven morphological and physiological plasticity are interrelated remains unclear. Using rapid time-lapse two-photon calcium imaging of network activity and single-neuron growth within the unanesthetized developing brain, we demonstrate that visual stimulation induces coordinated changes to...

Targeted reinnervation is a new neural-machine interface that has been developed to help improve the function of new-generation prosthetic limbs. Targeted reinnervation is a surgical procedure that takes the nerves that once innervated a severed limb and redirects them to proximal muscle and skin sites. The sensory afferents of the redirected nerves reinnervate the skin overlying the transfer s...

OBJECTIVES To investigate sensory changes present in patients with chronic whiplash-associated disorders and chronic idiopathic neck pain using a variety of quantitative sensory tests to better understand the pain processing mechanisms underlying persistent symptoms. METHODS A case control study was used with 29 subjects with chronic whiplash-associated disorders, 20 subjects with chronic idi...

BACKGROUND Schizophrenia is associated with large effect-size deficits in auditory sensory processing, as reflected in impaired delayed-tone matching performance. The deficit may reflect either impaired sensory precision, which would be indicative of neural dysfunction within auditory sensory (temporal) regions, or of increased distractibility, which would be indicative of impaired prefrontal f...

The acoustic rearing environment can alter central auditory coding properties, yet altered neural coding is seldom linked with specific deficits to adult perceptual skills. To test whether developmental hearing loss resulted in comparable changes to perception and sensory coding, we examined behavioral and neural detection thresholds for sinusoidally amplitude modulated (sAM) stimuli. Behaviora...

Although patients with a depressive disorder report often of pain, their sensitivity to experimental pain is controversial, probably due to differences in sensory testing methods and to the lack of normal values. Therefore, we used a standardized and validated comprehensive sensory testing paradigm to assess the peripheral and central nervous system performance in depressive patients compared t...

42 Prior studies show that visual motion perception is more precise than vestibular motion 43 perception, but it is unclear whether this is universal or the result of specific experimental conditions. 44 We compared visual and vestibular motion precision over a broad range of temporal frequencies by 45 measuring thresholds for vestibular (subject motion in the dark), visual (visual scene motion...