Sensory information from tactile mechanoreceptors located in the glabrous skin of the hand is crucial for skillful object exploration and manipulation. These mechanoreceptors reliably encode the direction of fingertip forces, and the brain certainly relies on this information in both sensorimotor and cognitive tasks. In this study, we examined human ability to discriminate the direction of forc...

The very light contact forces (∼0.60 N) applied by the fingertips during tactile exploration reveal a clearly optimized sensorimotor strategy. To investigate the cortical mechanisms involved with this behavior, we recorded 230 neurons in the somatosensory cortex (S1), as two monkeys scanned different surfaces with the fingertips in search of a tactile target without visual feedback. During the ...