Alterations of tactile and anatomical spatial representations of the hand after stroke.

Stroke often causes long-term motor and somatosensory impairments. Motor planning and tactile perception rely on spatial body representations. However, the link between altered spatial body representations, motor deficit and tactile spatial coding remains unclear.

Cortical activations associated with spatial remapping of finger touch using EEG.

The spatial coding of tactile information is functionally essential for touch-based shape perception and motor control. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics of how tactile information is remapped from the somatotopic reference frame in the primary somatosensory cortex to the spatiotopic reference frame remains unclear. This study investigated how hand position in space or posture influences cortical somatosensory processing.

Post-Stroke Impairments of Manual Dexterity and Finger Proprioception: Their Contribution to Upper Limb Activity Capacity.

Background: Knowing how impaired manual dexterity and finger proprioception affect upper limb activity capacity is important for delineating targeted post-stroke interventions for upper limb recovery.

Objectives: To investigate whether impaired manual dexterity and finger proprioception explain variance in post-stroke activity capacity, and whether they explain more variance than conventional clinical assessments of upper limb sensorimotor impairments.

Methods: Activity capacity and hand sensorimotor impairments were assessed using clinical measures in N = 42 late subacute/chronic hemiparetic stroke patients.

Interhemispheric communication during haptic self-perception.

During the haptic exploration of a planar surface, slight resistances against the hand's movement are illusorily perceived as asperities (bumps) in the surface. If the surface being touched is one's own skin, an actual bump would also produce increased tactile pressure from the moving finger onto the skin. We investigated how kinaesthetic and tactile signals combine to produce haptic perceptions during self-touch.