Touch is vital for many human and animal behaviors, but our understanding of it lags other senses. We have deployed a suite of techniques to dissect mechanisms of touch perception in the mouse, from the biophysics of whisker bending to optogenetic manipulation of specific cortical circuits. I will present our recent work exploring how circuits of primary somatosensory cortex process sensory and motor signals to create a neural representation of tactile features during whisker-based object exploration.
