Computational Assessment of Mechanical Triggers for Spiking Activity During Surface Exploration - From Finite Element Analysis to Firing-Rate

This article discusses recent progress towards understanding of human tactile perception by exploiting finite element analysis to simulate the experiments done in vivo, and statistical tools to correlate simulated output with microneurography recordings. Elucidation of the mechanisms that govern human tactile perception is essential for understanding of human touch, not only from psychophysical point of view in terms of affective touch, but also from mechanical: identification of potential trigger parameters responsible for mechano-transduction would have an important influence on virtual prototyping and texture encoding, and would therefore play a vital role in further development of haptic devices.