Self-performed arm movements are known to increase the tactile detection threshold (i.e., decrease of tactile sensitivity) which is part of a phenomenon called tactile suppression. Today, the origin and the effects of tactile suppression are not fully understood. Tactile discrimination tasks have been utilized to quantify the changes in tactile sensitivity due to arm movements and to identify t...

To investigate whether superior tactile acuity in the blind is due to alterations of attentional selection mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of early blind and a group of sighted individuals who performed a difficult tactile spatial selection task. We found systematic differences in the attentional processing of tactile events between early blind and sig...

Dextrous robot hands need to be able to determine the pose of objects to reliably grasp and manipulate them. The first few contacts with an object can be used to provide an initial estimate of this information if we constrain the object to be of a particular class. This paper considers a simple example of exploiting class constraints: finding the axis of an unknown surface of revolution. Three ...

Specialized, bimodal neural systems integrate visual and tactile information in the space near the hand. Here, we show that visuo-tactile representations allow attention to influence early perceptual processing, namely, figure-ground assignment. Regions that were reached toward were more likely than other regions to be assigned as foreground figures, and hand position competed with image-based ...

objective: to investigate the correlation between lower and higher order sensory functions and manual dexterity as well as to identify the sensory measures that could predict manual dexterity in patients with idiopathic parkinson’s disease (pd). materials and methods: in this cross-sectional study, 55 patients with idiopathic pd by mean age of 59.85 ± 11.89 years, and mean hoehn and yahr stage ...

Nowadays, one of the main problems encountered in minimally invasive surgery and telesurgery is the detection of arteries in tissue. In this study, for the first time, tactile detection of an artery in tissue and distinguishing it from the tumor has been modeled by finite element method. In this modeling, three 2D models of tissue have been created: tissue, tissue including a tumor, and tissue ...