Over 150 years ago, E.H. Weber declared that experience showed that tactile acuity was not affected by viewing the stimulated body part. However, more recent investigations suggest that cross-modal links do exist between the senses. Viewing the stimulated body site improves performance on tactile discrimination and detection tasks and enhances tactile acuity. Here, we show that vision modulates...

During the first postnatal week, the distribution of callosal projection neurons in the rat somatosensory cortex changes from a uniform to a discontinuous pattern. To determine if this change is influenced by afferent inputs to the somatosensory cortex, the effect of both early unilateral infraorbital nerve section and unilateral removal of the dorsal thalamus on the distribution of callosal pr...

The dual nature of touch has long been understood. The sense of touch seems to carry information at the same time about the external object touching our skin, and also about our body itself. However, how these two interact has remained obscure. We present an analytic model of how tactile information interacts with mental body representations in the brain. Four such interactions are described: t...

The developing brain possesses a high potential for neuroplasticity. Yet, this remarkable potential of (re-)organization is not a general principle. It seems to vary among different functional systems. Here, we show that distinct brain structures involved in somatosensory processing are already prenatally determined so that a pre- or perinatally acquired (congenital) brain damage of such struct...

How can we investigate the brain mechanisms underlying self-consciousness? Recent behavioural studies on multisensory bodily perception have shown that multisensory conflicts can alter bodily self-consciousness such as in the "full body illusion" (FBI) in which changes in self-identification with a virtual body and tactile perception are induced. Here we investigated whether experimental change...

The neuronal mechanisms for ordering sensory signals in time still need to be clarified despite a long history of research. To address this issue, we recently developed a behavioral task of temporal order judgment in mice. In the present study, we examined the expression of c-Fos, a marker of neural activation, in mice just after they carried out the temporal order judgment task. The expression...