Tactile Stimulation of the Human Head for Information Display

A series of three studies was conducted to explore the use of tactile stimulation or light tapping of the human head to inform a pilot of possible threats or other situations in the flight environment. Study I confirmed that subjects could achieve 100% detection of the tactile stimuli. Localization performance, measured in Study 2, depended on the number of different stimulus sites and ranged from 93% accuracy for 6 sites to 47% accuracy for 12 sites across the parietal meridian of the head. In Study 3 we investigated the effect of performing the localization task simultaneously with a dual memory/tracking task or an air combat simulation task. These studies demonstrated that tactile information display could be an integral contributor to improved situation awareness, but not without cost to other task performance. The results of Study 3 were also examined with reference to popular models of attention and workload.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

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 “phantom touches” 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 – 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