Primary sensory cortices contain distinguishable spatial patterns of activity for each sense.

Abstract

Whether primary sensory cortices are essentially multisensory or whether they respond to only one sense is an emerging debate in neuroscience. Here we use a multivariate pattern analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data in humans to demonstrate that simple and isolated stimuli of one sense elicit distinguishable spatial patterns of neuronal responses, not only in their corresponding primary sensory cortex, but in other primary sensory cortices. These results indicate that primary sensory cortices, traditionally regarded as unisensory, contain unique signatures of other senses and, thereby, prompt a reconsideration of how sensory information is coded in the human brain.