Bilateral integration in somatosensory cortex is controlled by behavioral relevance
Sensory perception naturally requires processing stimuli from both sides of the body. Yet, how neurons bind stimulus features across the hemispheres to create a unified perceptual experience remains unknown. To address this question, we performed large-scale recordings from neurons in both somatosensory cortices (S1) while mice shared information between their hemispheres and discriminated between two categories of bilateral stimuli. When expert mice touched stimuli associated with reward, they moved their whiskers with greater bilateral symmetry. During this period, synchronous spiking and enhanced spike-field coupling emerged between the hemispheres. This coordinated activity was absent in stimulus-matched naive animals, indicating that interhemispheric (IH) binding was controlled by a goal-directed, internal process. In S1 neurons, the addition of ipsilateral touch primarily facilitated the contralateral, principal whisker response. This facilitation primarily emerged for reward-associated stimuli and was lost on trials where expert mice failed to respond. Taken together, these results reveal a novel state-dependent logic underlying bilateral integration in S1, where stimulus binding and facilitation are controlled by behavioral relevance.