During active exploration, the brain can enter different states. The original goal was to investigate the principles by which the internal brain states affect the neocortical brain representation of haptic events. The goal was to use fixed sets of artificial spatiotemporal tactile afferent activation patterns or mechanical haptic stimulation across spontaneously or experimentally induced changes in brain states to explore the related decoding. Furthermore, the principles of sensory augmentation, and its dependence on brain state, should be explored. The analysis should be made of in vivo whole cell patch clamp recordings in anesthetized animals and modelling of population level representations in the brain in vivo. More specifically, the goals were: 1) Manipulation of internal cortical states to explore impact on neocortical neuronal representations of fixed tactile inputs. 2) Mechanically induced cortical responses and the impact of manipulation of internal cortical states. 3) Modelling of impact on internal cortical states on systems level cortical representations of haptic inputs.

The expected results were that brain circuitry mechanisms affect the brain’s interpretation of haptic input features in neocortical neurons, and that the understanding will be at a level that can be used to generate bases for the design of new solutions for haptic interfaces.