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Somatosensation

Somatosensation

The somatosensory system relays sensory information from the skin, mucous membranes, limbs, and joints. Somatosensation is more familiarly known as the sense of touch. A typical somatosensory pathway includes three types of long neurons: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary neurons have cell bodies located near the spinal cord in groups of neurons called dorsal root ganglia. The sensory neurons of ganglia innervate designated areas of skin called dermatomes.

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

The cerebral cortex, the brain's outermost layer, is pivotal in processing complex cognitive tasks, emotions, and various sensory inputs and executing voluntary motor activities. This intricate structure is divided into three primary functional areas: the motor areas, sensory areas, and association areas.
Motor Areas
The motor areas located in the frontal lobe are central to controlling voluntary movements. This region is further subdivided into the primary motor cortex and the premotor cortex.

Sensory Perception: Organization of the Somatosensory System

Sensory Perception: Organization of the Somatosensory System

The somatosensory system is the central and peripheral nervous system component that senses and processes touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and body position or proprioception. The process of sensation takes place at three levels:
The receptor level:
The receptor level is the first stage of sensation. It involves the detection of a stimulus by specialized sensory receptors. The stimulus must arrive within the receptor's receptive field. Next, the receptor converts the energy of the stimulus...

Overview of Somatic Sensory Pathways

Overview of Somatic Sensory Pathways

Somatic sensory or somatosensory pathways refer to the neural pathways that carry information related to touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and proprioception from the skin, muscles, tendons, and joints to the brain. These pathways involve several stages of processing and integration of sensory information.
The somatosensory system is divided into three main pathways: the dorsal (or posterior) column-medial lemniscus, spinothalamic (or anterolateral), and spinocerebellar pathways.
The dorsal...

Major Somatic Sensory Pathways

Major Somatic Sensory Pathways

Sensory impulses related to touch, pressure, vibration, and proprioception from various body parts, such as the limbs, trunk, neck, and posterior head, travel to the cerebral cortex through the posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway. The pathway’s name derives from the two white-matter tracts that convey the impulses: the spinal cord's posterior column and the brainstem's medial lemniscus. First-order sensory neurons extend their axons into the spinal cord, forming the posterior columns...

Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex

Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex

The somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobes is crucial for interpreting sensory data such as touch, temperature, and proprioception. The somatosensory cortex, situated in the parietal lobes, plays a vital role in interpreting sensory information like touch, temperature, and proprioception—awareness of body position. This specialized brain region features an organized structure wherein neurons at the top primarily process sensations originating from the lower body. In contrast, those at the...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 11, 2026

Cross-Modal Multivariate Pattern Analysis

Cross-Modal Multivariate Pattern Analysis

Published on: November 9, 2011

Shape invariant coding of motion direction in somatosensory cortex.

Yu-Cheng Pei¹, Steven S Hsiao, James C Craig

¹Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

|February 4, 2010

Summary

Neural representations of tactile motion direction are invariant in primate somatosensory area 1. This finding explains how we perceive stable object motion across different tactile stimuli.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Somatosensory system
Tactile perception

Background:

Stable object perception relies on invariant representations of stimulus features.
Understanding how the brain processes tactile motion direction is crucial for deciphering sensory perception.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the invariance of neural representations of tactile motion direction in the primate somatosensory cortex.
To determine if specific neuronal populations encode motion direction independently of stimulus properties.

Main Methods:

Recorded neural responses in somatosensory areas 3b, 1, and 2 of macaque monkeys.
Utilized three tactile motion stimuli: scanned bars, dot patterns, and random dot displays.
Paired neural recordings with human psychophysical experiments on motion discrimination.

Main Results:

Identified a population of neurons in area 1 highly sensitive to motion direction.
Demonstrated that these area 1 neurons' motion signals are invariant across different stimulus types and conditions.
Showed that area 1 neural signals correlate with human ability to discriminate tactile motion direction.

Conclusions:

Primate area 1 contains a robust neural representation of tactile motion direction.
This representation is invariant to stimulus variations, contributing to stable tactile perception.
Suggests shared neural mechanisms for visual and tactile motion processing.