Availability of vision and tactile gating: vision enhances tactile sensitivity

A multitude of events bombard our sensory systems at every moment of our lives. Thus, it is important for the sensory and motor cortices to gate unimportant events. Tactile suppression is a well-known phenomenon defined as a reduced ability to detect tactile events on the skin before and during movement. Previous experiments (Buckingham et al. in Exp Brain Res 201(3):411-419, 2010; Colino et al. in Physiol Rep 2(3):e00267, 2014) found detection rates decrease just prior to and during finger abduction and decrease according to the proximity of the moving effector. However, what effect does vision have on tactile gating? There is ample evidence (see Serino and Haggard in Neurosci Biobehav Rev 34:224-236, 2010) observing increased tactile acuity when participants see their limbs. The present study examined how tactile detection changes in response to visual condition (vision/no vision). Ten human participants used their right hand to reach and grasp a cylinder. Tactors were attached to the index finger and the forearm of both the right and left arm and vibrated at various epochs relative to a "go" tone. Results replicate previous findings from our laboratory (Colino et al. in Physiol Rep 2(3):e00267, 2014). Also, tactile acuity decreased when participants did not have vision. These results indicate that the vision affects the somatosensation via inputs from parietal areas (Konen and Haggard in Cereb Cortex 24(2):501-507, 2014) but does so in a reach-to-grasp context.