Occupation-related long-term sensory training enhances roughness discrimination but not tactile acuity

Extensive use of sensorimotor properties has been shown to lead to use-dependent plasticity in the human motor cortex as well as sensory areas. The sensory consequences of these cortical changes, however, remain widely unclear. We were interested whether job-related long-term haptic training is measurable in terms of changes in haptic perception (active touch exploration) in manual physiotherapists (PT). To that end, the haptic thresholds of PT (students and employed) and registered osteopathic manual therapists (OMT; PT with postgraduate specialization) were measured and compared to age- and sex-matched control groups. Additionally, tactile acuity (passive static touch) was assessed using grating domes. PT and OMT had superior mean haptic thresholds compared to the control group, suggesting an increase in sensitivity through use. An age-related decline in haptic perception capacity occurred only in the control group, suggesting that the job-related training of the manual therapist groups may have slowed their age-related decline. Contrary to our expectation, we found significantly poorer mean haptic threshold results in the PT student group than for the controls. No significant differences or changes in tactile acuity were found for any of the groups (students and professional). The present results demonstrate use-dependent plasticity in manual therapists. Furthermore, the results underline the known effect of a superior discrimination ability of haptic as opposed to tactile perception.