Cutaneous stimulus registration and information processing in the somesthetic cortex

Abstract

The author reviews the evidence that the acquisition of sequential tactile information and stereometric object identification by manual exploration is a process which is analogous to the scanning of visual scenes. The hypothesis that somatosensory and visual maps in the respective primary cortical projection areas are of the same analytical structure is argued. New experimental data documented in subhuman primates demonstrate that neural responses to cutaneous stimuli depend on situational factors and on behavior-controlling instructions conveyed over another sense modality and that as a result the redundancy of cutaneous stimulus encoding in the somesthetic cortex is reduced.