Response Time in Somatosensory Discrimination Tasks is Sensitive to Neurological Insult

Author Info

Favorov OV Francisco EM Holden JK Lensch R Tommerdahl AP Tommerdahl M

Corresponding Author

Tommerdahl M
Cortical Metrics, LLC

A B S T R A C T

Background: A number of reports have demonstrated significant differences in human performance on diverse somatosensory-based discriminatory tasks dependent on the individual’s neurological status. For example, compromised neurological status has been shown to lead to poor performance on tactile-based tasks such as vibrotactile stimulus amplitude discrimination, frequency discrimination, temporal order judgement, timing perception, and reaction time, and these deficits have been observed across a diverse spectrum of neurological disorders. Results: In this report, response time of recently concussed individuals (1-3 days) was found to be significantly longer (~25%) than that of non-concussed individuals (i.e., controls) and individuals recovering from concussion (10+ days post-concussion). Additionally, a significant difference was found in response time on two different tasks. Timing perception, which is hypothesized to engage significantly more neural circuitry than amplitude discrimination, had a significantly longer average response time than amplitude discrimination. Conclusions: These findings strongly suggest that response time could be used as a discriminative measure when evaluating overall neurological health and/or cognitive function, and this is consistent with findings of other reports that examined speed-accuracy trade-offs on discrimination tasks.

Article Info

Article Type

Research Article

Publication history

Received: Fri 25, Oct 2019
Accepted: Thu 28, Nov 2019
Published: Wed 11, Dec 2019

Copyright

© 2023 Tommerdahl M. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.NNB.2019.04.01