Remembering touch: Somatosensory cortex supports long-term memory for dynamic vibrotactile patterns.
- 1Neurocomputation and Neuroimaging Unit, Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Abstract
The neural substrates of tactile long-term memory (LTM) in humans remain poorly understood, as relatively few neuroimaging studies have addressed this question. Here, we asked whether retrieval of tactile stimulation engages modality-specific representations in the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices (S1 and S2), alongside domain-general retrieval networks. Participants learned 16 tactile trajectories, each presented for 1.2 s on the left thumb through sequential activation of 10 vibrating dots on a Braille-like display. Three learning sessions within one week were followed by a recognition test during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the final sample (n = 26), we contrasted BOLD responses during successful recognition of learned stimuli with those during correct rejection of novel stimuli. Successful recognition was associated with increased activity in contralateral S1 and S2, alongside activation in the hippocampus as well as frontal and parietal regions implicated in memory retrieval. A psychophysiological interaction analysis (PPI) further revealed increased task-dependent connectivity between the hippocampus and contralateral S1 and S2 during successful recognition. Together, these findings suggest that tactile long-term memory retrieval relies on coordinated hippocampal-somatosensory interactions and may engage long-term memory representations in somatosensory cortex.
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BibTeX
@misc{schmidt2026remembering,
title = {{Remembering touch: Somatosensory cortex supports long-term memory for dynamic vibrotactile patterns.}},
author = {M. E. Schmidt and T. T. Schmidt and T. Nierhaus and F. Blankenburg},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.27.754826},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.27.754826v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Remembering touch: Somatosensory cortex supports long-term memory for dynamic vibrotactile patterns.
AU - M. E. Schmidt
AU - T. T. Schmidt
AU - T. Nierhaus
AU - F. Blankenburg
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/27
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.27.754826
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.27.754826v1
AB - The neural substrates of tactile long-term memory (LTM) in humans remain poorly understood, as relatively few neuroimaging studies have addressed this question. Here, we asked whether retrieval of tactile stimulation engages modality-specific representations in the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices (S1 and S2), alongside domain-general retrieval networks. Participants learned 16 tactile trajectories, each presented for 1.2 s on the left thumb through sequential activation of 10 vibrating dots on a Braille-like display. Three learning sessions within one week were followed by a recognition test during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the final sample (n = 26), we contrasted BOLD responses during successful recognition of learned stimuli with those during correct rejection of novel stimuli. Successful recognition was associated with increased activity in contralateral S1 and S2, alongside activation in the hippocampus as well as frontal and parietal regions implicated in memory retrieval. A psychophysiological interaction analysis (PPI) further revealed increased task-dependent connectivity between the hippocampus and contralateral S1 and S2 during successful recognition. Together, these findings suggest that tactile long-term memory retrieval relies on coordinated hippocampal-somatosensory interactions and may engage long-term memory representations in somatosensory cortex.
ER -