Revisiting Face-to-Hand Area Remapping in the Human Primary Somatosensory Cortex after a Cervical Spinal Cord Injury
6 affiliations
- 1Neural Control of Movement lab, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland
- 2Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland
- 3Spinal Cord Injury Center Balgrist, University Hospital Zürich, University of Zürich, 8008 Zürich, Switzerland
- 4Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America
- 5Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America
- 6Reconfigurable Robotics Lab, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract
Spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to profound disruptions in sensorimotor processing. Seminal research in nonhuman primates suggests this sensory deprivation causes functional remapping in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1), where somatotopic representations of deprived body parts, such as the hand in cervical SCI, become responsive to touch on intact body parts, such as the face. However, evidence for such remapping in humans remains inconclusive. We investigated face-to-hand remapping in 16 chronic cervical SCI patients (15 male, 1 female) and 21 able-bodied controls (19 male, 2 female) using two fMRI experiments. Experiment 1 employed a lip movement task, while Experiment 2 investigated the full architecture of S1 face reorganization through vibrotactile stimulation of the forehead, lips, and chin. We assessed (1) the level of face activity in the anatomical S1 hand area, (2) cortical shifts in peak face activity, (3) face-part separability in the S1 hand area, and (4) correlations with clinical characteristics that may drive face-to-hand area remapping. Our results revealed no significant evidence in favor of face-to-hand area remapping in tetraplegic patients across markers of face-to-hand remapping during either lip movement or vibrotactile stimulation of face parts. Furthermore, our markers of remapping did not correlate with clinical characteristics. Together, these findings indicate that cortical face-to-hand remapping could not be demonstrated in our cohort of chronic cervical SCI patients, highlighting the need to revisit assumptions of large-scale face-to-hand reorganization after SCI.
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BibTeX
@article{howell2026revisiting,
title = {{Revisiting Face-to-Hand Area Remapping in the Human Primary Somatosensory Cortex after a Cervical Spinal Cord Injury}},
author = {Paige Howell and Finn Rabe and Charlotte Meneghin and Simon Schading‐Sassenhausen and Hunter R. Schone and Harshal Sonar and Jamie Kyujin Paik and Patrick Freund and Nicole Wenderoth and Sanne Kikkert},
journal = {Journal of Neuroscience},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.1523/jneurosci.0644-25.2026},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.0644-25.2026},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Revisiting Face-to-Hand Area Remapping in the Human Primary Somatosensory Cortex after a Cervical Spinal Cord Injury
AU - Paige Howell
AU - Finn Rabe
AU - Charlotte Meneghin
AU - Simon Schading‐Sassenhausen
AU - Hunter R. Schone
AU - Harshal Sonar
AU - Jamie Kyujin Paik
AU - Patrick Freund
AU - Nicole Wenderoth
AU - Sanne Kikkert
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/20
JO - Journal of Neuroscience
DO - 10.1523/jneurosci.0644-25.2026
UR - https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.0644-25.2026
AB - Spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to profound disruptions in sensorimotor processing. Seminal research in nonhuman primates suggests this sensory deprivation causes functional remapping in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1), where somatotopic representations of deprived body parts, such as the hand in cervical SCI, become responsive to touch on intact body parts, such as the face. However, evidence for such remapping in humans remains inconclusive. We investigated face-to-hand remapping in 16 chronic cervical SCI patients (15 male, 1 female) and 21 able-bodied controls (19 male, 2 female) using two fMRI experiments. Experiment 1 employed a lip movement task, while Experiment 2 investigated the full architecture of S1 face reorganization through vibrotactile stimulation of the forehead, lips, and chin. We assessed (1) the level of face activity in the anatomical S1 hand area, (2) cortical shifts in peak face activity, (3) face-part separability in the S1 hand area, and (4) correlations with clinical characteristics that may drive face-to-hand area remapping. Our results revealed no significant evidence in favor of face-to-hand area remapping in tetraplegic patients across markers of face-to-hand remapping during either lip movement or vibrotactile stimulation of face parts. Furthermore, our markers of remapping did not correlate with clinical characteristics. Together, these findings indicate that cortical face-to-hand remapping could not be demonstrated in our cohort of chronic cervical SCI patients, highlighting the need to revisit assumptions of large-scale face-to-hand reorganization after SCI.
SN - 0270-6474
SN - 1529-2401
ER -