TY - JOUR T1 - Emergence of an invariant representation of texture in primate somatosensory cortex JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/646042 SP - 646042 AU - Justin D. Lieber AU - Sliman J. Bensmaia Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/24/646042.abstract N2 - A major function of sensory processing is to achieve neural representations of objects that are stable across changes in context and perspective. Small changes in exploratory behavior can lead to large changes in signals at the sensory periphery, thus resulting in ambiguous neural representations of objects. Overcoming this initial ambiguity is a hallmark of human object recognition across sensory modalities. Here, we investigate the perception of tactile texture, which is stable across a wide range of exploratory movements of the hand, including changes in scanning speed, despite the strong dependence of the peripheral response on hand movements. To probe the neural basis of speed-tolerant texture representations, we scanned a wide range of everyday textures across the fingertips of Rhesus macaques at multiple speeds and recorded the responses evoked in tactile nerve fibers and somatosensory cortical neurons (in Brodmann’s areas 3b, 1, and 2). We found that, unlike afferents, individual cortical neurons exhibit a wide range of speed-sensitivities: some neurons are more strongly driven by changes in speed than peripheral afferents, while others exhibit responses that are nearly speed-independent. As a result, compared to the periphery, the cortical population exhibits 1) an increased ability to simultaneously encode independent representations of speed and texture, and 2) an increased ability to account for the speed-tolerant perception of texture in human subjects. Finally, we demonstrate that this separation of speed and texture information is a natural consequence of previously described cortical computations. ER -