A primary goal of cortical physiology is to explain how the cortex transforms incoming information to generate precise output behaviour. A recent work from our group show that cortical astrocytes are crucial to set the threshold detection of neuronal circuities across cortical layers to compute specific sensory modalities. But how can astrocyte help to set the sensibility of neurons in a modality-specific manner? By using in vivo electrophysiology and sensory experiments in fosTRAP2 mice, we show that disruption of cortical astrocyte activity impairs the transfer of information across the feedforward architecture of layers in the somatosensory cortex. This effect at circuit level strongly affected encoding behaviour and impaired sensory responses. Regarding the discrimination of sensory modalities, our data using genetic GCaMP6f and CAMPARI strategies in ex vivo preparations show that astrocyte population within each cortical layer differ in their connectivity and ability to transfer information across layers and exhibit different sensitivity for NT and NM released following distinct sensory stimulation (i.e. ACh, Phe, Glut, GABA, ATP). These results indicate that astrocytes serve to set the sensibility of local network within cortical layers to modulate the detection of sensory modalities. In addition, we show that astrocytes are key to allow a proper transfer of information across layers thereby representing a complementary mechanism mediating cortical transformation and computation across the layers.