Dynamic cutaneous information is sufficient for precise curvature discrimination.
TLDR
Curvature discrimination performance was best in the current study when dynamic cutaneous stimulation occurred in the absence of active movement, and for both age groups, the curvature discrimination thresholds obtained for passive touch were significantly lower than those that occurred during active touch.Abstract:
Our tactual perceptual experiences occur when we interact, actively and passively, with environmental objects and surfaces. Previous research has demonstrated that active manual exploration often enhances the tactual perception of object shape. Nevertheless, the factors that contribute to this enhancement are not well understood. The present study evaluated the ability of 28 younger (mean age was 23.1 years) and older adults (mean age was 71.4 years) to discriminate curved surfaces by actively feeling objects with a single index finger and by passively feeling objects that moved relative to a restrained finger. While dynamic cutaneous stimulation was therefore present in both conditions, active exploratory movements only occurred in one. The results indicated that there was a significant and large effect of age, such that the older participants’ thresholds were 43.8 percent higher than those of the younger participants. Despite the overall adverse effect of age, the pattern of results across the active and passive touch conditions was identical. For both age groups, the curvature discrimination thresholds obtained for passive touch were significantly lower than those that occurred during active touch. Curvature discrimination performance was therefore best in the current study when dynamic cutaneous stimulation occurred in the absence of active movement.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Aging and the Haptic Perception of Material Properties.
J. Farley Norman,Olivia C. Adkins,Stevie C. Hoyng,Catherine J. Dowell,Lauren E. Pedersen,Ashley N. Gilliam +5 more
TL;DR: While older adults are able to effectively perceive the solid shape of environmental objects using the sense of touch, their ability to perceive surface materials is significantly compromised.
Journal ArticleDOI
Haptic shape discrimination and interhemispheric communication.
Catherine J. Dowell,J. Farley Norman,Jackie R. Moment,Lindsey M. Shain,Hideko F. Norman,Flip Phillips,Astrid M. L. Kappers +6 more
TL;DR: Bimanual haptic exploration can be as effective as unimanual exploration, showing that there is no necessary reduction in ability when haptic shape comparison requires interhemispheric communication.
Journal ArticleDOI
Aging and Haptic-Visual Solid Shape Matching.
J. Farley Norman,Olivia C. Adkins,Catherine J. Dowell,Stevie C. Hoyng,Ashley N. Gilliam,Lauren E. Pedersen +5 more
TL;DR: When perceiving naturally shaped objects such as bell peppers, it appears that the usage of a single finger can be as effective as haptic exploration with a whole complement of five fingers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Haptic adaptation to slant: No transfer between exploration modes
TL;DR: It is found that adaptation-induced perceptual changes did not transfer between exploration modes, and a potential combination of information from different exploration modes can only occur at down-stream cortical processing stages, at which adaptation is no longer effective.
Journal ArticleDOI
Top-down modulation of shape and roughness discrimination in active touch by covert attention.
TL;DR: The results suggest that active touch perception is modulated by expectations about the task, which implies that despite fundamental differences, active and passive touch are affected by feature selective covert attention in a similar way.
References
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Book
Detection Theory: A User's Guide
TL;DR: This book discusses Detection and Discrimination of Compound Stimuli: Tools for Multidimensional Detection Theory and Multi-Interval Discrimination Designs and Adaptive Methods for Estimating Empirical Thresholds.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hand movements: a window into haptic object recognition.
TL;DR: Two experiments establish links between desired knowledge about objects and hand movements during haptic object exploration, and establish that in free exploration, a procedure is generally used to acquire information about an object property, not because it is merely sufficient, butBecause it is optimal or even necessary.
Journal ArticleDOI
Observations on active touch.
TL;DR: Preliminary results indicate that the cross-modal matching of these novel preceptions is possible even for a naive observer, and that practice can bring about errorless judgments in all observers so far tested.
Journal ArticleDOI
Central cancellation of self-produced tickle sensation.
TL;DR: FMRI examination of neural responses when subjects experienced a tactile stimulus that was either self-produced or externally produced suggests that the cerebellum is involved in predicting the specific sensory consequences of movements, providing the signal used to cancel the sensory response to self-generated stimulation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Objective methods for determining the functional value of sensibility in the hand
TL;DR: Two methods of fingerprinting were elaborated to register the sudomotor function, and consequently the tactile gnosis objectively, and their anatomical background, sources of error and relative value are discussed.
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