Neural representations of haptic object size in the human brain revealed by multivoxel fMRI patterns

Abstract

Our understanding of the neural basis of haptics (perceiving the world through touch) remains incomplete. We used functional MRI to study human haptic judgments of object size, which require integrating multiple afferent signals. Multivoxel pattern analyses identified intraparietal and prefrontal regions that encode size haptically in a metric and hand-invariant fashion. Effector-independent haptic size estimates are useful on their own and in combination with other sensory estimates for a variety of perceptual and motor tasks.