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Related Concept Videos

Tactile and Chemical Senses01:27

Tactile and Chemical Senses

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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.
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Somatosensation01:33

Somatosensation

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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.
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Sensory Perception: Organization of the Somatosensory System01:11

Sensory Perception: Organization of the Somatosensory System

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The somatosensory system is the central and peripheral nervous system component that senses and processes touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and body position or proprioception. The process of sensation takes place at three levels:
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Sensory Functions of the Skin01:16

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The skin is the largest organ of the human body and plays a crucial role in our sensory perception. It contains a vast network of sensory receptors that contribute to the skin's protective function by perceiving physical, biological, and environmental cues and generating relevant responses.
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Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development01:14

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The sensorimotor stage, the initial phase of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, spans the first two years of a child's life. During this period, infants actively engage with their surroundings, building cognitive awareness through direct interaction with the world. This interaction is primarily based on sensory perception and motor actions, allowing infants to gradually understand basic physical properties and predict how objects interact within their environment.
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Perception01:28

Perception

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Perception is a fundamental psychological process that enables individuals to organize, interpret, and consciously experience sensory information. This process is crucial for understanding and interacting with the world around us. It includes both bottom-up and top-down processing, each playing a distinct role in how we perceive our environment.
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Related Experiment Videos

Seeing Touches Early in Life.

Margaret Addabbo1, Elena Longhi2, Nadia Bolognini3

  • 1Department of Psychology and NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience, University of Milan-Bicocca, Piazza Ateneo Nuovo 1 (U6), 20126, Milano, Italy.

Plos One
|September 15, 2015
PubMed
Summary

Three-month-old infants visually recognize touching gestures, while newborns show a preference only for human-to-human touch. This suggests an early visual ability to process tactile interactions.

Related Experiment Videos

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human Perception

Background:

  • The sense of touch is crucial for development and understanding the world.
  • Infants' ability to visually process touch-related stimuli is not well understood.
  • This study investigates the early visual recognition of touching gestures.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To explore the developmental origins of visually recognizing touching gestures.
  • To determine if infants can differentiate between touching and non-touching visual stimuli.
  • To assess age-related differences in processing visual touch cues.

Main Methods:

  • A visual preference task was used with 2-day-old newborns and 3-month-old infants.
  • Participants viewed videos of touching and non-touching gestures involving body parts and objects.
  • Looking times and orienting responses were measured to assess visual discrimination.

Main Results:

  • Three-month-olds preferred videos of touching gestures over non-touching ones.
  • Newborns did not differentiate between touching and non-touching gestures involving a face.
  • Newborns discriminated hand-to-hand touch but not object-to-hand touch.

Conclusions:

  • Three-month-old infants possess an early ability to visually recognize human-to-human touching gestures.
  • Newborns show limited visual discrimination of touching gestures, particularly for object interactions.
  • Findings support an early developmental emergence of visually processing tactile interactions between body parts.