The role of vibration in tactile speed perception

The relative motion between the surface of an object and our fingers produces patterns of skin deformation such as stretch, indentation, and vibrations. In this study, we hypothesized that motion-induced vibrations are combined with other tactile cues for the discrimination of tactile speed. Specifically, we hypothesized that vibrations provide a critical cue to tactile speed on surfaces lacking individually detectable features like dots or ridges. Thus masking vibrations unrelated to slip motion should impair the discriminability of tactile speed, and the effect should be surface-dependent. To test this hypothesis, we measured the precision of participants in discriminating the speed of moving surfaces having either a fine or a ridged texture, while adding masking vibratory noise in the working range of the fast-adapting mechanoreceptive afferents. Vibratory noise significantly reduced the precision of speed discrimination, and the effect was much stronger on the fine-textured than on the ridged surface. On both surfaces, masking vibrations at intermediate frequencies of 64 Hz (65-μm peak-to-peak amplitude) and 128 Hz (10 μm) had the strongest effect, followed by high-frequency vibrations of 256 Hz (1 μm) and low-frequency vibrations of 32 Hz (50 and 25 μm). These results are consistent with our hypothesis that slip-induced vibrations concur to the discrimination of tactile speed.