Neurological reports of "tactile blindsight" suggest that the human somatosensory system can extract behaviorally useful information about the location of a tactile stimulus in the absence of conscious awareness that the stimulus occurred (Paillard et al., 1983; Rossetti et al., 1995). However, in a series of psychophysical experiments with neurologically intact subjects, we found no evidence f...

In this work we investigate how the tactile detection thresholds of air-driven actuators are influenced by design parameters as membrane thickness and diameter, when the finger is in contact with the deformable circular elastic membranes. We report lower thresholds with decreasing membrane thickness and increasing diameters. These results can help in the design of soft actuators for pin-arrays ...

Touch Sensing This is the detection and measurement of a contact force at a defined point. A touch sensor can also be restricted to binary information, namely touch, and no touch. Tactile Sensing This is the detection and measurement of the spatial distribution of forces perpendicular to a predetermined sensory area, and the subsequent interpretation of the spatial information. A tactile-sensin...

BACKGROUND Previous research on patients with left tactile extinction has shown that crossing of hands, so that each hand is on the opposite side of the body midline relative to the other, improves detection of stimuli given to the left hand. OBJECTIVES To study the influence of the spatial position of limbs on left tactile extinction, and its relations with left visual neglect. METHODS Nor...

Perceptual completion is a fundamental perceptual function serving to maintain robust perception against noise. For example, we can perceive vivid experience of motion even for the discrete inputs across time and space (apparent motion: AM). In vision, stimuli irrelevant AM are suppressed smooth along trajectory where no physical applied. We investigated whether such masking induced by dynamic ...

The influence of ipsilesional tactile and visual stimuli on the ability to detect contralesional tactile stimuli was investigated in eight right brain damaged patients (RBD) with tactile extinction and in eight healthy subjects by delivering a series of single and double stimuli. Double stimuli were unimodal (tactile or visual) or cross-modal (tactile and visual) and could be delivered simultan...

BACKGROUND Hypervigilance, i.e., excessive attention, is often invoked as a potential explanation for the observation that many individuals with fibromyalgia show a heightened sensitivity to stimulation in various sensory modalities, such as touch and hearing. Compelling evidence for this assumption is, however, lacking. The aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of somatosens...