Our new study has been published in Cortex! We used high-resolution 7T fMRI to investigate how the brain represents the hand’s posture and location during tactile processing. Participants received touch to their fingers while their hands were positioned either on the left or right side of the body and configured either open or closed.

Interestingly, we found that different aspects of hand posture were represented in partially distinct brain regions. Hand location could be decoded from activity in the superior parietal lobule (SPL) and anterior intraparietal area (aIPS), while hand configuration could be decoded from activity in the SPL and primary somatosensory cortex (S1). These findings provide evidence that the parietal cortex plays an important role in incorporating hand posture into tactile processing, while S1 may also represent the form and configuration of the hand.

Together, these results provide new evidence for the neural systems that allow us to integrate information about where our hand is, what shape it is in, and where we are being touched—helping us construct a flexible representation of our body in space. Read the manuscript here.