Tactile spatial acuity is enhanced in blindness, according to several studies, but the cause of this enhancement has been controversial. Two competing hypotheses are the tactile experience hypothesis (reliance on the sense of touch drives tactile-acuity enhancement) and the visual deprivation hypothesis (the absence of vision itself drives tactile-acuity enhancement). Here, we performed experim...

UNLABELLED Impaired tactile acuity in people with chronic pain conditions has been suggested to reflect altered cortical representation of the painful body part, and treatments that aim to improve tactile acuity in these conditions have shown clinical benefit. Whether abnormalities in tactile acuity are a consistent feature of chronic pain remains largely unknown. The aim of this review was to ...

OBJECTIVE This article provides an overview of tactile displays. Its goal is to assist human factors practitioners in deciding when and how to employ the sense of touch for the purpose of information representation. The article also identifies important research needs in this area. BACKGROUND First attempts to utilize the sense of touch as a medium for communication date back to the late 1950...

Information obtained from multiple sensory modalities, such as vision and touch, is integrated to yield a holistic percept. As a haptic approach usually involves cross-modal sensory experiences, it is necessary to develop an apparatus that can characterize how a biological system integrates visual-tactile sensory information as well as how a robotic device infers object information emanating fr...

The vibro-tactile alarm was easier to learn than the auditory alarm (p<0.05). The performance of the vibro-tactile alarm was significantly better than the auditory alarm in identification rate (p<0.002) and accuracy (p<0.002). Surprisingly, the combined vibrotactile and auditory alarm was not better than the vibro-tactile alarm alone due to an increased rate of misinterpreted alarms. Most users...

An immersive technology being developed by the Army to provide enhanced situation awareness for military personnel involves the use of tactile stimulators arranged in a matrix pattern surrounding the torso. When activated sequentially the tactile display can be swept over the torso to provide a sense of motion. This tactile stimulus can alter the perceived experience of self-motion produced by ...

[Purpose] The interaction between the visual and tactile modalities influences on different levels from neural activity, perception, higher cognition to behavior. The aim of this study was to examine how a visual stimulus influences tactile sensitivity depending on temporal asynchrony. [Subjects and Methods] In total, 15 participants took part in this study. They were required to perform a two-...

OBJECTIVE The Somatic Signal Detection Task (SSDT; Lloyd, Manson, Brown and Poliakoff, 2008) is an innovative paradigm to study perceptual processes related to physical symptoms. It allows examining touch illusions as a laboratory analog of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) according to the cognitive model of MUS proposed by Brown (2004). The present study compared psychopathologic measures ...

The work presented in this paper is part of our investigation in the ROBOSKIN project. The project aims to develop new robot capabilities based on the tactile feedback provided by novel robotic skin. The main objective of the project is to develop cognitive mechanisms to improve human-robot interaction capabilities. One application domain that is investigated in the project is robot-assisted pl...

This paper addresses the temporal factors involved in the integration of auditory and tactile information. Perceptual threshold values for auditory-tactile asynchrony were measured using a broadband noise for the auditory stimulus (presented to the subjects via headphones) and a sinusoidal wave for the tactile stimulus (presented at the tip of the index finger via a shaker). In the first experi...