A slow, gentle caress of the skin is a salient hedonic stimulus. Low threshold, unmyelinated C-tactile afferents fire preferentially to this type of touch, where slow (<1 cm/s) and fast (>10 cm/s) stroking velocities produce lower firing frequencies and are rated as less pleasant. The current aim was to investigate how the experience of tactile pleasantness changes with repeated exposure (satie...

Pain and the conscious mind (or the self) are experienced in our body. Both are intimately linked to the subjective quality of conscious experience. Here, we used virtual reality technology and visuo-tactile conflicts in healthy subjects to test whether experimentally induced changes of bodily self-consciousness (self-location; self-identification) lead to changes in pain perception. We found t...

2D tactile arrays may be integrated into handheld devices or VR controllers to enhance user experience, for example, with touch communication for collaborative tasks. Multiple tactors (tactile elements) may be activated in combination to approximate a vibration point (virtual tactor) having arbitrary position and intensity. We studied the combination of intensities from multiple tactors to guid...

Congenital blindness is one of the rare human models to explore the role of experience-driven cross-modal compensation after early sensory deprivation. We re-examined spatial attention abilities in congenitally blind participants and sighted controls using a paradigm comparable to the one of our previous study (Collignon, Renier, Bruyer, Tranduy, & Veraart, 2006), except that this time the audi...

Complete involvement of learners in their learning environment has the potential to promote better absorption of knowledge, through pedagogic mechanisms such as experiential learning. To support such approaches within the domain of cultural heritage, this article discusses the deployment of tactile perception as a part of an ongoing development of a multimodal learning platform to complement le...

Recently, haptic devices have been successfully incorporated into the human-computer interaction model. However, a drawback common to almost all haptic systems is that the user must be attached to the haptic device at all times, even though force feedback is not always being rendered. This constant contact hinders perception of the virtual environment, primarily because it prevents the user fro...

Recently, haptic devices have been successfully incorporated into the human-computer interaction model. However, a drawback common to almost all haptic systems is that the user must be attached to the haptic device at all times, even though force feedback is not always being rendered. This constant contact hinders perception of the virtual environment, primarily because it prevents the user fro...

Nowadays, the creation of methodologies and tools for facilitating the 3D reproduction of artworks and, contextually, to make their exploration possible and more meaningful for blind users is becoming increasingly relevant in society. Accordingly, the creation of integrated systems including both tactile media (e.g., bas-reliefs) and interfaces capable of providing the users with an experience ...

Tactile maps constitute the media most commonly used by blind and partially sighted people for the exploration of spatial information. However, compared to maps for sighted people, they are inconvenient to produce and contain less information. We have developed methods and implemented them prototypically, by which visually impaired people can explore a geographical area flexibly with the help o...

Empirical research on the bodily self has only recently started to investigate how the link between a body and the experience of this body as mine is developed, maintained or disturbed. The Rubber Hand Illusion has been used as a model instance of the normal sense of embodiment to investigate the processes that underpin the experience of body-ownership. This review puts forward a neurocognitive...