US EditionBrain's Visual Regions Contain Hidden Touch Maps, Study Finds
Researchers found 174 participants’ brains simulate touch in specific body-part maps when watching others, revealing sensory system integration that may aid autism understanding.
- Parts of the brain thought to process only vision are also organized according to a 'map' of the body, which allows visual images to trigger touch sensations.
- In dorsal regions, body maps align with visual information, linking foot sensations to lower visuals and face sensations to upper visuals.
- Brain areas previously seen as purely visual demonstrate response patterns based on touch sensations that correlate with the viewer's own body.
- The study suggests that simulating what we observe aids in understanding others' experiences, with differing processes possibly in autistic individuals.
15 Articles
15 Articles
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Our sensory systems work together to generate a cohesive experience of the world around us. Watching others being touched activates brain areas representing our own sense of touch: the visual system recruits touch-related computations to simulate bodily consequences of visual inputs1. One long-standing question is how the brain implements this interface between visual and somatosensory representations2. Here, to address this question, we develop…
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