Sensory Systems

Sensory systems enable organisms to detect environmental and bodily stimuli, transduce them into neural signals, and integrate these signals to guide behaviour. Exteroceptive senses—vision, audition, olfaction, gustation, somatosensation and equilibrioception—extract information about light, sound, chemicals, mechanical forces and head‐position changes, respectively. Proprioceptive and interoceptive pathways monitor limb position and internal state. In each modality, specialised receptors (photoreceptors, hair cells, chemoreceptors, mechanoreceptors, otolith organs and semicircular canals) initiate graded or spiking responses that are relayed through hierarchically organised pathways—from peripheral nuclei through the thalamus to primary and association cortices—where stimulus features are increasingly elaborated. Feedback projections at every stage implement attention, expectation and constancy phenomena, while convergent multisensory circuits form unified percepts under uncertainty. Together, these systems underpin orientation, object recognition, communication and homeostatic regulation across diverse ecological contexts.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Ultra-high-field (9.4 T) fMRI in awake marmosets has mapped face and voice patches in occipito-temporal cortex and shown that audiovisual congruence engages extended parietal, prefrontal and cingulate networks beyond their unimodal summation. In parallel, a first-in-human bilateral AAV1/2-hOTOF gene-therapy trial in DFNB9 children restored auditory brainstem-response thresholds, speech perception and source-localisation without serious adverse events, demonstrating safe reversal of congenital deafness. Concurrent single-cell transcriptomic profiling of mature human utricular epithelia from vestibular surgery patients uncovered abundant hair-cell precursor populations and five dynamic gene-expression programmes—including Wnt and IGF-1 signalling—driving supporting-cell-to-hair-cell trajectories, thus revealing latent regenerative activity in human balance organs.

Research from all publishers

An ideal-observer model of multisensory causal inference accurately predicts human observers’ nonlinear audiovisual cue weighting, showing that signals are fused only when inferred to share a common source. Developmental studies in infants indicate that temporal synchrony and associative learning first establish coarse crossmodal alignment, which is later refined by higher-order knowledge into adult-like spatial recalibration. A conceptual framework in songbird migration integrates cage and free-flight data to propose that magnetic-cue reliance varies with migratory stage and ecological context, and suggests that low reproducibility in laboratory tests arises from species- and context-dependent flexibility in cue integration.

Sensory Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in sensory systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Photoreceptor: A specialised retinal cell (rod or cone) that converts photon absorption into an electrical response.

Opsin: The protein component of visual pigment; when bound to retinal, it forms rhodopsin or cone photopsins.

Adeno-associated virus (AAV): A non-pathogenic viral vector used for in vivo gene delivery to sensory organs.

Causal inference: The computational process by which the brain assesses whether multiple sensory cues arise from the same event and should be integrated.

Equilibrioception: Sensory detection of head orientation and motion via otolith organs and semicircular canals in the inner ear.

Ultra-high-field fMRI: Functional magnetic resonance imaging performed at field strengths ≥7 Tesla, offering sub-millimetre spatial resolution for mapping cortical circuits.

References

1. Mapping of facial and vocal processing in common marmosets with ultra-high field fMRI. Communications Biology (2024).
2. Bilateral gene therapy in children with autosomal recessive deafness 9: single-arm trial results. Nature Medicine (2024).
3. Single-cell transcriptomic atlas reveals increased regeneration in diseased human inner ear balance organs. Nature Communications (2024).
4. Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception. PLOS ONE (2007).
5. Development and experience-dependence of multisensory spatial processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2023).
6. A conceptual framework on the role of magnetic cues in songbird migration ecology. Biological Reviews (2024).