Cortical integration of tactile inputs distributed across timescales

Sensory experiences in the real world cut across timescales from milliseconds to seconds. Emerging evidence suggests that somatosensory processing is sensitive to the temporal structure of the stimuli in the sub-second scale, yet only a few select ranges within this scale have been studied. To process real-world information, the integration of tactile inputs must occur over a much broader temporal range. To address temporal integration across timescales, we studied scalp EEG signals from somatosensory cortex in response to a train of tactile stimuli presented to the fingertips with varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) spanning hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds. We captured the variations in cortical signals as a function of the subsequent ISIs (next interval structure). We tracked cortical tactile processing through its early (