Studies in monkeys indicate that proprioceptive and tactile inputs are conveyed from the thalamus to the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) and thence to the secondary somatosensory area (SII) in a serial scheme. In contrast, in the cat, tactile information is conveyed in parallel from the thalamus to SI and SII. The present study, in the cat, employed reversible inactivation of SI to determine whether proprioceptive inputs to SII from joint receptors depend on an indirect serial path via SI or are conveyed over a direct path from the thalamus. 2. SI and SII foci for knee joint inputs were determined with evoked potential mapping. Reversible inactivation of the SI focus by cooling had no effect on the amplitude, latency or time course of SII potentials evoked by joint inputs. There was also no consistent effect on the response levels of individual SII neurones examined during SI inactivation. Furthermore, there was no attenuation of the later components of the responses, and therefore no evidence that these depended on an indirect path to SII via SI. 3. Results demonstrate that proprioceptive inputs project directly from thalamus to SII over a pathway organized in parallel with that to SI, in contrast to the serial scheme reported for proprioceptive processing in primates.
