This study was a big effort and I want to thank our participants, without whom none of this would be possible, as well as Luke Bashford, David Bjånes, Kelsie Pejsa, our neurosurgeons Brian Lee and Charles Liu, and of course Richard Andersen!

Finally, we examine neural activity in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) when visual cues were delivered without ICMS (participants were expecting ICMS to be delivered), and see that S1 encodes visual information across realistic and abstract contexts when it relates to ICMS.

We also show that the point of peak temporal simultaneity varied between our participants but was significantly different from zero in both - so we can't assume that ICMS is perfectly temporally aligned with vision.

Long story short, the participants were more likely to perceive tactile and visual cues as occurring simultaneously when visual information was more realistic, showing that visual context affects how ICMS is processed by the brain.

literally my thesis

If you wouldn’t mind please add me to this list!

This work was the third chapter of my PhD dissertation and I'm excited to see it out in the world. Many thanks to my co-authors, in particular Luke and David, for much needed help along the way!

Finally, we looked at primary somatosensory cortex (S1) during visual stimuli (without ICMS). S1 neural activity was tuned to visual information, and was highly similar across realistic and abstract conditions. So S1 represents ICMS-relevant visual information across contexts. 4/4

The realistic visual environment also affected the qualitative experience of the ICMS, suggesting that vision can help stabilize ICMS percepts in addition to extending the temporal binding window. 3/4

We compared realistic & abstract visual conditions, paired with intra-cortical microstimulation (ICMS) at delivered at different timing offsets. In the realistic condition, participants reported ICMS and vision as occurring simultaneously more often! 2/4