Disrupted stimulus encoding shapes tactile perception in autism

Summary Touch is fundamental for our interaction with the world, and atypical tactile experience is one of the core characteristics of autism, significantly affecting daily life. However, we do not know the neural underpinnings of low-level tactile perception and how they change in autism. Using a translational perceptual task, we reveal that concomitant neuronal activation and inhibition in the primary somatosensory cortex encode tactile stimuli and determine their detection. We recapitulate the multifaceted tactile features of autistic individuals in the Fmr1 -/y mouse model of autism, showing tactile hyposensitivity, interindividual variability, and unreliable responses. Weak stimulus encoding in Fmr1 -/y -hyposensitive mice renders perception vulnerable to the ongoing network state and impedes reliable response decoding. Strengthening stimulus encoding by decreasing neuronal hyperexcitability in Fmr1 -/y -hyposensitive mice improves tactile perception. Our work shows an evolutionarily conserved role for the primary somatosensory cortex in tactile detection and presents a highly translational approach for probing neuronal-perceptual changes in neurodevelopmental conditions.