Probing the cortical neuronal correlates of a sensory discrimination process.

Key to understanding perception is the form of how sensory stimuli are represented in the evoked activity of the brain. Here, we addressed the question of which components of the evoked neuronal activity in the somatosensory cortex represent the stimulus features while trained monkeys discriminated the difference in frequency between two vibrotactile stimuli. We probed whether these cortical neuronal representations are essential to perception. The results show a strong link between the cortical representation of the stimulus and perception.