Two cortical processes run alongside each other when barrel cortex is deprived of sensory input from some whiskers to produce representational plasticity. In deprived cortex, neuronal responses to spared whiskers are enhanced and responses to deprived whiskers are weakened. These two processes have different time courses, with the weakening of deprived response preceding the strengthening of spared response, implying that they have different underlying mechanisms. These two effects combine to produce an expansion of the cortical representation of spared whiskers into the representation of adjacent deprived whiskers.