Selective Enhancement of Post-Sleep Visual Motion Perception by Repetitive Tactile Stimulation during Sleep

Yoshiyuki Onuki*, Oti Lakbila-Kamal, Bo Scheffer, Eus J.W. Van Someren, Ysbrand D. Van der Werf

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Tactile sensations can bias visual perception in the awake state while visual sensitivity is known to be facilitated by sleep. It remains unknown, however, whether the tactile sensation during sleep can bias the visual improvement after sleep. Here, we performed nap experiments in human participants (n = 56, 18 males, 38 females) to demonstrate that repetitive tactile motion stimulation on the fingertip during slow wave sleep selectively enhanced subsequent visual motion detection. The visual improvement was associated with slow wave activity. The high activation at the high beta frequency was found in the occipital electrodes after the tactile motion stimulation during sleep, indicating a visual-tactile cross-modal interaction during sleep. Furthermore, a second experiment (n = 14, 14 females) to examine whether a hand- or head-centered coordination is dominant for the interpretation of tactile motion direction showed that the biasing effect on visual improvement occurs according to the hand-centered coordination. These results suggest that tactile information can be interpreted during sleep, and can induce the selective improvement of post-sleep visual motion detection.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7400-7411
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Neuroscience
Volume42
Issue number39
Early online date22 Aug 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Sept 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Programmes for Excellence “Brain & Cognition: an Integrated Approach”, 433-09-245. We thank Joris Coppens for building the MR compatible tactile stimulus delivery device, Mike X. Cohen for advices on EEG analysis, Jennifer R. Ramautar and Germán Gómez-Herrero for technical assistance in the sleep experiments, Verena Sommer for technical assistance in the preliminary experiments, Chris I. de Zeeuw, Ryo Kitada, and Astrid M.L Kappers for the helpful comments on the results.

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2022 the authors.

Keywords

  • consolidation
  • cross-modal interaction
  • sleep
  • tactile
  • vision

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