TY - JOUR
AR - NNB-2019-4-101
TI - Response Time in Somatosensory Discrimination Tasks is Sensitive to Neurological Insult
AU - Favorov, OV
AU - Francisco, EM
AU - Holden, JK
AU - Lensch, R
AU - Tommerdahl, AP
AU - Tommerdahl, M
JO - Neurology and Neurobiology
PY - 2019
DA - Wed 11, Dec 2019
SN - 2613-7828
DO - http://dx.doi.org/10.31487/j.NNB.2019.04.01
UR - https://www.sciencerepository.org/response-time-in-somatosensory-discrimination_NNB-2019-4-101 
KW - Somatosensory, response time, discrimination task, amplitude discrimination, duration discrimination
AB - 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.