OBJECTIVE To determine whether tactile acuity is disrupted in people with knee OA and to determine whether tactile acuity, a clinical signature of primary sensory cortex representation, is related to motor imagery performance (MIP; evaluates working body schema) and pain. METHODS Experiment 1: two-point discrimination (TPD) threshold at the knee was compared between 20 participants with painf...

Perceptual decisions arise after considering the available sensory evidence [1]. When sensory information is unreliable, a good strategy is to rely on previous experience in similar situations to guide decisions [2-6]. It is well known that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired at value-based decision-making [7-11]. How patients combine past experience and sensory information to m...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study is to investigate whether quantitative sensory testing with Von Frey monofilaments (VFMs) can be used for the quantification of allodynia in patients with chronic neuropathic pain, and how the pain threshold of affected skin differs from healthy skin. METHODS Using VFMs, we aimed to determine the pain threshold in 22 patients suffering from allodynia as a cons...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether chronic suppurative otitis media may cause sensorineural hearing loss. METHODS The files of 121 patients with unilateral chronic suppurative otitis media were reviewed in a retrospective study. Air conduction and bone conduction threshold averages were calculated over the speech frequencies (500 Hz, 1,000 Hz, and 2,000 Hz). Thresholds at 4 kHz were examined sepa...

While sensory processing latency, inferred from the manual reaction time (RT), is substantially affected by diverse stimulus parameters, subjective temporal judgments are relatively accurate. The neural mechanisms underlying this timing perception remain obscure. Here, we measured human neural activity by magnetoencephalography while participants performed a simultaneity judgment task between t...

To determine the effect of an established mutation of the beta1 subunit of Na(+) channels on nerve excitability, studies were undertaken in patients diagnosed with generalized epilepsy with febrile seizures plus (GEFS+). Multiple nerve excitability measurements were used to investigate the membrane properties of sensory and motor axons in five patients (aged 18-55 years) who were currently expe...

The voltage dependence of indices of axonal excitability were quantified for cutaneous afferents in eight normal subjects, using the threshold for a target compound sensory action potential as a measure of membrane potential. The membrane potential was altered using subthreshold depolarizing and hyperpolarizing currents of various sizes (-50% to +50% of threshold). Refractoriness and supernorma...

We build on evidence from neurobiology to model the process through which the brain maps evidence received from the outside world into decisions. This mechanism can be represented by a decision-threshold model. The sensory system encodes information in the form of cellfiring. Cell-firing is then measured against a threshold and an action is triggered depending on whether the threshold is surpas...