The objective of this proposal is to understand how people perceive tactile patterns. The project will focus on the processing of tactile spatial patterns. Studies will be conducted comparing interactions between spatial patterns presented to the same location and to separate locations. Results from the psychophysical and perceptual measures will be related to neurophysiological studies of peripheral and central responses to tactile stimuli. Tactile spatial patterns will be generated by means of several types of displays. One is the newly-developed dense array, which consists of 400 independently-controlled tactors in a 20 x 20 matrix. The center-to-center spacing of the contactor points can be varied from 0.5 mm to 1.0 mm. The dense array will be used to generate spatial patterns that selectively activate different populations of mechanoreceptors and to study spatial sensitivity on the fingerpad and palm. The dense array will also be used to examine the conditions for producing perceptual changes related to sensory plasticity. Studies will be conducted with the dense array as well as arrays from the Optacon, a reading aid for the blind, to investigate such perceptual phenomena as temporal integration, temporal masking, response competition, and selective attention. Measurements will also be made of subjects' abilities to resolve spatial gratings. One of the aims of the project is to compare the results obtained with tactile stimuli to studies conducted with visual and auditory stimuli. Results from the project will be relevant to the development of cutaneous communication systems for the deaf, blind, and deaf-blind and to the measurement and understanding of neurological problems.
| Craig, James C; Rhodes, Roger P; Busey, Thomas A et al. (2010) Aging and tactile temporal order. Atten Percept Psychophys 72:226-35 |
| Pei, Yu-Cheng; Hsiao, Steven S; Craig, James C et al. (2010) Shape invariant coding of motion direction in somatosensory cortex. PLoS Biol 8:e1000305 |
| Pei, Yu-Cheng; Denchev, Peter V; Hsiao, Steven S et al. (2009) Convergence of submodality-specific input onto neurons in primary somatosensory cortex. J Neurophysiol 102:1843-53 |
| Yoshioka, Takashi; Zhou, Julia (2009) Factors Involved in Tactile Texture Perception through Probes. Adv Robot 23:747-766 |
| Bensmaia, S J; Hsiao, S S; Denchev, P V et al. (2008) The tactile perception of stimulus orientation. Somatosens Mot Res 25:49-59 |
| Pei, Y C; Hsiao, S S; Bensmaia, S J (2008) The tactile integration of local motion cues is analogous to its visual counterpart. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 105:8130-5 |
| Bensmaia, Sliman J; Denchev, Peter V; Dammann 3rd, J Francis et al. (2008) The representation of stimulus orientation in the early stages of somatosensory processing. J Neurosci 28:776-86 |
| Craig, James C; Rhodes, Roger P; Gibson, Gregory O et al. (2008) Discriminating smooth from grooved surfaces: effects of random variations in skin penetration. Exp Brain Res 188:331-40 |
| Muniak, Michael A; Ray, Supratim; Hsiao, Steven S et al. (2007) The neural coding of stimulus intensity: linking the population response of mechanoreceptive afferents with psychophysical behavior. J Neurosci 27:11687-99 |
| Gibson, Gregory O; Craig, James C (2006) The effect of force and conformance on tactile intensive and spatial sensitivity. Exp Brain Res 170:172-81 |
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