Figure 3.

Neural elements in tactile stimulation experiments. To the left is the rat's hand with representative cutaneous receptive fields. When the tactor touches a particular “receptive field” on the hand, VPL thalamus receives this information and relays it to S1 cortex. To emulate “natural touch” with microstimulation, the optimized spatiotemporal microstimulus patterns are injected into the same receptive field on VPL thalamus through a microarray so that the target neural activity pattern can be replicated in somatosensory regions (S1) to convey the natural touch sensation to the animal.