Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain

Hedger, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2733-1913, Naselaris, T., Kay, K. and Knapen, T. (2025) Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain. Nature. ISSN 0028-0836 doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09796-0

Abstract/Summary

Our sensory systems work together to generate a cohesive experience of the world around us. Watching others being touched activates brain areas representing our own sense of touch: the visual system recruits touch-related computations to simulate bodily consequences of visual inputs1. One long-standing question is how the brain implements this interface between visual and somatosensory representations 2. To address this question, we developed a model to simultaneously map somatosensory body part tuning and visual field tuning throughout the brain. Applying our model to ongoing co-activations during rest resulted in detailed maps of the body part tuning in the brain’s endogenous somatotopic network. During movie-watching, somatotopic tuning explains responses throughout the entire dorsolateral visual system, revealing an array of somatotopic body maps that tile the cortical surface. The body-position tuning of these maps aligns with visual tuning, predicting both preferences for visual field locations and visual-category preferences for body parts. These results reveal a mode of brain organization in which aligned visual-somatosensory topographic maps connect visual and bodily reference frames. This cross-modal interface is ideally situated to translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats useful for action, social cognition, and semantic processing

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/127242
Identification Number/DOI	10.1038/s41586-025-09796-0
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN) Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Neuroscience
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
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