Correctly perceiving the environment is vital: for example, an animal has to know whether the object ahead is a trap or a food source. But how is sensory information translated in the brain into a meaningful representation of the environment or used to ensure that an animal moves appropriately? Two articles in this issue review these fascinating aspects of sensory processing.

As nocturnal animals, rodents rely primarily on their whiskers to collect information about the location ('where') and characteristics ('what') of objects in their immediate surroundings. Diamond and colleagues (page 601) review our understanding of how this information is encoded and discuss the current key questions, such as whether the whisker somatosensory system — like the visual system — uses separate cortical processing streams for information regarding 'where' and 'what'.

Determining whether sensory input is triggered by an external source or by one's own movement is also important for interpreting the environment. A remarkably uniform strategy involving routing a copy of the movement command (corollary discharge; CD) to the sensory pathway is conserved across species. On page 587, Crapse and Sommer review different types of CD across the animal kingdom, distil the core circuits that they exemplify, and propose a functional taxonomic classification scheme that should aid future research into how CD influences perception.

It has long been accepted that there is diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures. In a Perspective on page 646, Han and Northoff describe recent neuroimaging studies which show that one's cultural background also influences the neural activity that underlies some cognitive functions.