Integration of stimuli from across the primate hand

Tactile sensation and discrimination are critical functions of the primate hand, yet the integration of signals from the many sensory neurons in the hand is not well understood. Here, the authors provided evidence for widespread sensory input integration in the brain of the owl monkey, Aotus trivirgatus. While small minimal receptive fields in monkey primary somatosensory cortex area 3b are important for stimulus localization, the results in this study indicate that integration in area 3b can also span beyond these small receptive fields. Information is integrated not only within digits, but across the hand in a type of global stimulus processing.