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Pleasant touch may serve as a foundation for affiliative behavior, providing a mechanism for the formation and maintenance of social bonds among conspecifics. In humans, this touch is usually referred to as the caress. Dynamic caressing performed on the hairy skin with a velocity of 1–10 cm/s is perceived as being pleasant and determines positive cardio-physiological effects. Furthermore, imaging human studies show that affiliative touch activates the posterior insular cortex (pIC). Recently, it was demonstrated that pleasant touch in monkeys (i.e., sweeping in a grooming-like manner) is performed with velocities similar to those characteristics of human caress (9.31 cm/s), and causes similarly positive autonomic effects, if performed with velocity of 5 cm/s and 10 cm/s, but not lower or higher. Due to similarities between the human caress and non-human primate sweeping, we investigated for the first time whether single neurons of the perisylvian regions (secondary somatosensory cortex [SII] and pIC) of a rhesus monkey can process sweeping touch differently depending on the stimulus speed. We applied stimulation with two speeds: one that optimally induces positive cardio-physiological effects in the monkey who receives it, and includes the real speed of sweep (5–15 cm/s, sweep fast), and a non-optimal speed (1–5 cm/s, sweep slow). The results show that single neurons of insular cortex differently encode the stimulus speed. In particular, even the majority of recorded somatosensory neurons (82.96%) did not discriminate the two speeds, a small set of neurons (16.59%) were modulated just during the sweep fast. These findings represent the first evidence that single neurons of the non-human primates insular cortex can code affiliative touch, highlighting the similarity between human and non-human primates’ social touch systems. This study constitutes an important starting point to carry out deeper investigation on neuronal processing of pleasant sweeping in the central nervous system.

Single Neurons in the Insular Cortex of a Macaque Monkey Respond to Skin Brushing: Preliminary Data of the Possible Representation of Pleasant Touch