Recurrent Neural Processing and Somatosensory Awareness

The neural mechanisms of stimulus detection, despite extensive research, remain elusive. The recurrent processing hypothesis, a prominent theoretical account of perceptual awareness, states that, although stimuli might in principle evoke feedforward activity propagating through the visual cortex, stimuli that become consciously detected are further processed in feedforward-feedback loops established between cortical areas. To test this theory in the tactile modality, we applied dynamic causal modeling to electroencephalography (EEG) data acquired from humans in a somatosensory detection task. In the analysis of stimulation-induced event-related potentials (ERPs), we focused on model-based evidence for feedforward, feedback, and recurrent processing between primary and secondary somatosensory cortices. Bayesian model comparison revealed that, although early EEG components were well explained by both the feedforward and the recurrent models, the recurrent model outperformed the other models when later EEG segments were analyzed. Within the recurrent model, stimulus detection was characterized by a relatively early strength increase of the feedforward connection from primary to secondary somatosensory cortex (>80 ms). At longer latencies (>140 ms), also the feedback connection showed a detection-related strength increase. The modeling results on relative evidence between recurrent and feedforward model comparison support the hypothesis that the ERP responses from sensory areas arising after aware stimulus detection can be explained by increased recurrent processing within the somatosensory network in the later stages of stimulus processing.