Importance of spike timing in touch: an analogy with hearing?

•Touch and hearing both process rapidly time varying signals.•Tactile and auditory afferents produce temporally precise responses.•Behaviorally relevant information is encoded in spike timing in touch and hearing.•Auditory timbre and tactile texture perception may involve similar computations.•Touch and hearing may rely on similar temporal mechanisms.

Touch is often conceived as a spatial sense akin to vision. However, touch also involves the transduction and processing of signals that vary rapidly over time, inviting comparisons with hearing. In both sensory systems, first order afferents produce spiking responses that are temporally precise and the timing of their responses carries stimulus information. The precision and informativeness of spike timing in the two systems invites the possibility that both implement similar mechanisms to extract behaviorally relevant information from these precisely timed responses. Here, we explore the putative roles of spike timing in touch and hearing and discuss common mechanisms that may be involved in processing temporal spiking patterns.