Search research articles

ABOUT JoVE

Overview Leadership Blog JoVE Help Center

AUTHORS

Publishing Process Editorial Board Scope & Policies Peer Review FAQ Submit

LIBRARIANS

Testimonials Subscriptions Access Resources Library Advisory Board FAQ

RESEARCH

JoVE Journal Methods Collections JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments Archive

EDUCATION

JoVE Core JoVE Business JoVE Science Education JoVE Lab Manual Faculty Resource Center Faculty Site

Terms & Conditions of Use

Related Concept Videos

Tactile and Chemical Senses

Tactile and Chemical Senses

Tactile senses encompass touch, temperature, and pain, each mediated by specific receptors. Touch receptors detect mechanical energy or pressure against the skin. Sensory fibers from these receptors enter the spinal cord and relay information to the brain stem. Here, most fibers cross over to the opposite side of the brain. The touch information then moves to the thalamus, which projects a map of the body's surface onto the somatosensory areas of the parietal lobes in the cerebral cortex. This...

Sensory Modalities

Sensory Modalities

Sensation typically is the process by which the sensory receptors and sense organs detect stimuli from the internal and external environment and transmit this information to the central nervous system for processing.
General senses refer to the broad category of sensory information detected by receptors in the body and can be further grouped into somatic and visceral senses. Somatic sensations include touch, pressure, temperature, and pain and are essential for navigating our environment and...

Design Example: Resistive Touchscreen

Design Example: Resistive Touchscreen

A device engineer plays a crucial role in designing user interfaces for mobile devices. One such interface is the resistive touchscreen, which fundamentally consists of two metallic layers: a flexible upper layer and a rigid lower layer, separated by a narrow gap. The high resistance between these two layers is a key characteristic of this design.
When a user touches the screen, the two layers make contact at a specific point known as the touchpoint. This contact reduces the resistance between...

Somatosensation

Somatosensation

The somatosensory system relays sensory information from the skin, mucous membranes, limbs, and joints. Somatosensation is more familiarly known as the sense of touch. A typical somatosensory pathway includes three types of long neurons: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary neurons have cell bodies located near the spinal cord in groups of neurons called dorsal root ganglia. The sensory neurons of ganglia innervate designated areas of skin called dermatomes.

Overview of Somatic Sensory Pathways

Overview of Somatic Sensory Pathways

Somatic sensory or somatosensory pathways refer to the neural pathways that carry information related to touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and proprioception from the skin, muscles, tendons, and joints to the brain. These pathways involve several stages of processing and integration of sensory information.
The somatosensory system is divided into three main pathways: the dorsal (or posterior) column-medial lemniscus, spinothalamic (or anterolateral), and spinocerebellar pathways.
The dorsal...

Design Example

Design Example

The innovation of touch-tone telephony revolutionized the telecommunications industry by replacing the traditional rotary dial with a dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling system. This system uses a matrix-style keypad with buttons arranged in four rows and three columns, creating 12 distinct signals each assigned to a pair of frequencies. Each button press results in a simultaneous generation of two sinusoidal tones – one from a low-frequency group (697 to 941 Hz) and one from a...

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by

Same author

Effects of receptor density on the tactile perception of roughness: implications for neural mechanisms of texture perception.

Somatosensory & motor research·2021

Same author

Perception of the tactile texture of raised-dot patterns: further evidence of an opponent process in the sense of touch.

Somatosensory & motor research·2018

Same author

Multidomain, Surface Layer-associated Glycoside Hydrolases Contribute to Plant Polysaccharide Degradation by Caldicellulosiruptor Species.

The Journal of biological chemistry·2016

Same author

Roughness perception in tactile channels: evidence for an opponent process in the sense of touch.

Somatosensory & motor research·2013

Same author

Population-response model for vibrotactile spatial summation.

Somatosensory & motor research·2006

Same author

Spatial summation in the tactile sensory system: probability summation and neural integration.

Somatosensory & motor research·2006

Search research articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 31, 2026

Applying Incongruent Visual-Tactile Stimuli during Object Transfer with Vibro-Tactile Feedback

Applying Incongruent Visual-Tactile Stimuli during Object Transfer with Vibro-Tactile Feedback

Published on: May 23, 2019

Learning in tactile channels.

George A Gescheider¹, John H Wright

¹Institute for Sensory Research, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. ggeschei@hamilton.edu

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

|July 20, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Tactile intensity discrimination improves with practice, but learning is specific to the sensory channel. This suggests training refines sensory processes, not general task skills, by reducing neural noise.

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: May 31, 2026

Applying Incongruent Visual-Tactile Stimuli during Object Transfer with Vibro-Tactile Feedback

Applying Incongruent Visual-Tactile Stimuli during Object Transfer with Vibro-Tactile Feedback

Published on: May 23, 2019

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Sensory Physiology
Human Factors

Background:

Tactile intensity discrimination is crucial for interacting with the environment.
Understanding the mechanisms of tactile learning can inform rehabilitation and human-computer interaction.
Previous research suggests limited transferability of motor learning, but less is known about sensory learning specificity.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the specificity of tactile intensity-discrimination learning.
To determine if improvements transfer across different tactile sensory channels (Pacinian, rapidly adapting, slowly adapting I).
To test the hypothesis that tactile learning involves sensory process changes rather than general skill acquisition.

Main Methods:

Participants performed vibrotactile intensity discrimination tasks on the thenar eminence.
Training involved repeated discrimination trials using specific stimulus frequencies (250 Hz for Pacinian corpuscle channel, 20 Hz for rapidly adapting/slowly adapting I channels).
Transfer of training was assessed across different nerve fiber channels and to the contralateral hand.

Main Results:

Practice improved intensity discrimination, but improvements were channel-specific.
Training the Pacinian corpuscle channel did not improve performance in the rapidly adapting/slowly adapting I channels, and vice versa.
Learning did not transfer to the untrained contralateral hand, supporting sensory-specific learning.
Learning within the Pacinian corpuscle channel generalized to an untrained intensity level.
Training reduced the intensity difference limen but did not affect the sensation-magnitude function slope.

Conclusions:

Tactile intensity-discrimination learning is highly specific to the trained sensory channel.
Learning likely involves neural adaptations within specific tactile pathways, such as reduced neural noise.
Findings support the hypothesis that tactile learning modifies sensory processing, not general task-related skills.