Sherrie De Ocampo is the first author of a 2007 study connecting sensory reports during expansion of the rectum with measured anal motor responses. The investigators increased the volume of a balloon step by step in 23 healthy participants, recorded pressure using a six-sensor probe, and asked about fullness and the desire to defecate. This combined a controlled mechanical stimulus, an objective motor measurement and a subjective sensory report.[ref]
All participants exhibited the rectoanal inhibitory reflex and a contractile reflex. The response associated with perception was an anal contraction: its first occurrence coincided with fullness in four participants and with the desire to defecate in nineteen. This distinction matters experimentally: a pressure decrease associated with the rectoanal inhibitory reflex and a perception-associated pressure increase describe different responses. The observations established an association between sensation and motor activity in this experiment; they did not make a pressure trace a direct readout of conscious sensation.[ref]
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