Student Projects
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Brain plasticity after spinal cord injury
In this project we are interested in identifying how finger-specific population receptive fields change in the primary somatosensory cortex following a tetraplegic spinal cord injury. Following a tetraplegic spinal cord injury, patients experience a (partial) loss of sensory and motor function of their limbs and torso. This is thought to lead to extensive reorganisation in brain areas containing detailed map-like body representations (e.g. the primary somatosensory cortex), such that neighbouring body-part representations ‘invade’ the area deprived of input and/or output. However, using a novel experimental approach we recently demonstrated, using an attempted movement paradigm and functional MRI (fMRI), that the functional representation of patients’ hands is preserved even decades after injury (Kikkert et al., 2021 eLife).
In this project, we want to dive into this already existing fMRI dataset more deeply. As receptive field sizes have been thought to be dependent on daily sensory experience, it is likely that finger-movement related receptive field sizes may change after tetraplegia, even though the functional representation of the hand is preserved. In this project we aim to tease these two processes apart.
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