115 research outputs found
The effects of vibrotactile masking on heartbeat detection:evidence that somatosensory mechanoreceptors transduce heartbeat sensations
Tactual perception: a review of experimental variables and procedures
This paper reviews literature on tactual perception. Throughout this review we will highlight some of the most relevant variables in touch literature: interaction between touch and other senses; type of stimuli, from abstract stimuli such as vibrations, to two- and three-dimensional stimuli, also considering concrete stimuli such as the relation between familiar and unfamiliar stimuli or the haptic perception of faces; type of participants, separating studies with blind participants, studies with children and adults, and an analysis of sex differences in performance; and finally, type of tactile exploration, considering conditions of active and passive touch, the relevance of movement in touch and the relation between exploration and time. This review intends to present an organised overview of the main variables in touch experiments, attending to the main findings described in literature, to guide the design of future works on tactual perception and memory.This work was funded by the Portuguese âFoundation for Science and Technologyâ through PhD scholarship SFRH/BD/35918/2007
When Right Feels Left: Referral of Touch and Ownership between the Hands
Feeling touch on a body part is paradigmatically considered to require stimulation of tactile afferents from the body part in question, at least in healthy non-synaesthetic individuals. In contrast to this view, we report a perceptual illusion where people experience âphantom touchesâ on a right rubber hand when they see it brushed simultaneously with brushes applied to their left hand. Such illusory duplication and transfer of touch from the left to the right hand was only elicited when a homologous (i.e., left and right) pair of hands was brushed in synchrony for an extended period of time. This stimulation caused the majority of our participants to perceive the right rubber hand as their own and to sense two distinct touches â one located on the right rubber hand and the other on their left (stimulated) hand. This effect was supported by quantitative subjective reports in the form of questionnaires, behavioral data from a task in which participants pointed to the felt location of their right hand, and physiological evidence obtained by skin conductance responses when threatening the model hand. Our findings suggest that visual information augments subthreshold somatosensory responses in the ipsilateral hemisphere, thus producing a tactile experience from the non-stimulated body part. This finding is important because it reveals a new bilateral multisensory mechanism for tactile perception and limb ownership
The effects of a plastic-film covering on vibrotactile pattern perception with the Optacon
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