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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on March 19, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2008 3(2):97-108; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn005
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Cognitive influences on the affective representation of touch and the sight of touch in the human brain

Ciara McCabe1, Edmund T. Rolls1, Amy Bilderbeck1 and Francis McGlone2

1University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, and 2Department of Neurological Sciences, School of Medicine, Liverpool University UK

We show that the affective experience of touch and the sight of touch can be modulated by cognition, and investigate in an fMRI study where top-down cognitive modulations of bottom-up somatosensory and visual processing of touch and its affective value occur in the human brain. The cognitive modulation was produced by word labels, ‘Rich moisturizing cream’ or ‘Basic cream’, while cream was being applied to the forearm, or was seen being applied to a forearm. The subjective pleasantness and richness were modulated by the word labels, as were the fMRI activations to touch in parietal cortex area 7, the insula and ventral striatum. The cognitive labels influenced the activations to the sight of touch and also the correlations with pleasantness in the pregenual cingulate/orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. Further evidence of how the orbitofrontal cortex is involved in affective aspects of touch was that touch to the forearm [which has C fiber Touch (CT) afferents sensitive to light touch] compared with touch to the glabrous skin of the hand (which does not) revealed activation in the mid-orbitofrontal cortex. This is of interest as previous studies have suggested that the CT system is important in affiliative caress-like touch between individuals.

Keywords: cognition and emotion; cognition and touch; orbitofrontal cortex; anterior cingulate cortex; insular cortex

Correspondence should be addressed to Prof. Edmund T. Rolls, University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. E-mail: Edmund.Rolls{at}psy.ox.ac.uk.

Received October 15, 2007. Accepted January 25, 2008.


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