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Related Experiment Videos

Keeping the world a constant size: object constancy in human touch.

Marisa Taylor-Clarke1, Pamela Jacobsen, Patrick Haggard

  • 1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.

Nature Neuroscience
|February 18, 2004
PubMed
Summary
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Perceived object size on skin is surprisingly consistent, despite varying touch receptor density. Visual body experience recalibrates tactile perception, suggesting the brain adjusts body maps to maintain size constancy.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Sensory Perception
  • Somatosensation

Background:

  • Tactile perception of object size is influenced by skin receptor density, which varies across the body.
  • Existing models predict significant variations in perceived size based on receptor density, but this is not observed.
  • This discrepancy suggests other factors modulate tactile size perception.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the influence of visual body experience on tactile distance and size perception.
  • To understand the neural mechanisms underlying tactile size constancy.
  • To propose a model for how the brain integrates visual and tactile information for body representation.

Main Methods:

  • Manipulating participants' visual experience of their own bodies.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Measuring perceived tactile distances and object sizes on different body parts.
  • Analyzing the relationship between visual body representation and tactile judgments.

    • Main Results:

    • Altering visual body experience significantly changed perceived tactile distances.
    • The brain appears to rescale distorted body-surface representations based on visual input.
    • This rescaling helps maintain a stable perception of object size (tactile size constancy).

    Conclusions:

    • Visual experience plays a crucial role in calibrating tactile perception.
    • The brain actively constructs a unified body representation by integrating sensory information.
    • A proposed model suggests rescaling of body maps into object-centered coordinates preserves tactile size constancy.