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Related Experiment Videos

Viewing the body modulates tactile receptive fields.

Patrick Haggard1, Anastasia Christakou, Andrea Serino

  • 1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, University College London, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK. p.haggard@ucl.ac.uk

Experimental Brain Research
|May 18, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Seeing your own body part improves touch sensitivity by refining the receptive fields of touch-sensing neurons. This visual feedback sharpens tactile perception, especially for nearby stimuli.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Somatosensory system
  • Psychophysics

Background:

  • Tactile discrimination relies on somatosensory cortical (SI) neuron receptive field (RF) size.
  • Top-down factors significantly influence tactile performance.
  • Psychophysical masking can reveal 'virtual' somatosensory neuron RFs.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how non-informative vision of a touched body part modulates tactile RFs.
  • To determine if visual feedback of the forearm enhances tactile discrimination.
  • To explore the impact of visual information extent on tactile perception.

Main Methods:

  • Ten subjects performed spatial discrimination tasks on the forearm.
  • Vibrotactile maskers were applied at varying distances around tactile targets.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Subjects viewed either their forearm or a neutral object in the target location.

    • Main Results:

    • Tactile discrimination improved when subjects viewed their forearm versus a neutral object.
    • The enhancing effect was dependent on the extent of visual information provided.
    • Visualizing the body altered the spatial gradient of masking, reducing distant masker effects and enhancing close masker effects.

    Conclusions:

    • Non-informative vision of the touched body part enhances tactile discrimination.
    • This enhancement is proposed to result from sharpened tactile RFs due to top-down modulation of lateral inhibition.
    • Visual feedback optimizes functional touch by refining somatosensory processing.