Somatosensory Receptive Fields

Understanding the receptive field structures of neurons has played an important role in deciphering how information about the external world is represented and transformed along the pathways leading to perception. We first describe the receptive fields of the peripheral afferents that innervate the skin of the hand. We show that of these mechanoreceptive afferents only the slowly adapting type 1 and rapidly adapting afferents provide information about two-dimensional spatial form. We then show the receptive fields of neurons in primary (SI) and secondary (SII) somatosensory cortex and demonstrate that the receptive fields become much larger and more elaborate as the information flows centrally, with neurons in cortex containing regions of excitation and inhibition that extract information about features of the stimuli.