Abstract: The design of effective upper arm prosthetics depends on developing ways to effectively provide sensory feedback to the patients.  In this talk I will describe how information about objects and feature of objects are represented in the somatosensory cortex.  I will show that information about shapes that you grasp in your hands are encoded in the afferent fibers that innervate the hand and describe how that information is processed in the central neural circuits in the first and second somatosensory cortex.  The data shows that while the mechanisms of two-dimensional form and motion processing are similar in touch and vision, the mechanisms of three dimensional touch are different and rely of combined inputs from the cutaneous afferents with the proprioceptive afferents.  Understanding how information is coded is critically important when designing feedback stimuli for neural prosthetics.  To this end I will show data from initial experiments in providing sensory feedback to trained animals.

 

Bio: Professor Steven Hsiao of the Johns Hopkins University received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University.  He then stayed on at Duke where he received a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering.  He then spent several years working in industry as a nuclear engineer and as a biomedical engineer at the NIH.  Dr. Hsiao then went to Johns Hopkins where he received his PhD in Biomedical engineering.  He stayed on at Johns Hopkins to do a post-doctoral fellow and is currently a Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering and in Psychological and Brain sciences. He currently serves as the scientific director of the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and is a co-director of the neuroscience graduate program.  His research is aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms of tactile perception and specifically to understand how object size, shape and texture are represented in the brain. Dr. Hsiao has published over 50 papers in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neuron and other esteemed journals.