“Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain”.

Nicholas Hedger, Thomas Naselaris, Kendrick Kay, Tomas Knapen

Abstract Our sensory systems work together to generate a cohesive experience of the world. Observing touch to others activates regions representing one’s own touch, suggesting that visual processing recruits touch-related computations. To examine this interface, we developed a model that jointly maps somatosensory body-part tuning and visual field tuning across the brain. During rest, the model recovered detailed body-part tuning in endogenous somatotopic networks. During movie viewing, somatotopic tuning explained responses throughout dorsolateral visual cortex, revealing multiple somatotopic body maps tiled across cortex. Body-position tuning aligned with visual tuning, predicting both visual field preferences and category preferences for body parts. These results suggest aligned visual-somatosensory topographic maps that connect visual and bodily reference frames and help translate sensory input into representations useful for action, social cognition, and semantic processing.