Since Hippocrates, the human sense of touch has been the most prevalent and successful medical diagnostic technique. A great variety of diseases were diagnosed through tactile sensing including detection of malignant tumors. Hippocrates in 400 B.C. wrote as follows: “... Such swellings as are soft, free from pain, and yield to the finger, ... and are less dangerous than the others. ... then, as...

This paper presents a learning model that enables a robot to acquire body representation for its face which is invisible to itself while the robot touches it. Two processes are simultaneously carried out: self-organization of tactile sensor unit configuration though the visuo-tactile sensations by self-induced motor behaviors, and facial part detection based on the discontinuity of sensor values.

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) patients have a disturbed experience of body size and shape. Previously it has been shown that these body representation disturbances extend to enlarged perception of tactile distances. Here we investigated whether misperception of tactile size could be related to inaccurate elementary somatosensory perception. Tactile size perception was measured with the Tactile Estimati...

In what they described as "a tactile analog of blindsight," Paillard et al. (1983) reported the case of a woman with damage to the left parietal cortex who was profoundly impaired in detecting tactile stimuli but could nonetheless correctly identify their location (also Rossetti et al., 1995). This stands in direct contrast to reports of neurological patients who were unable to accurately locat...

Object recognition through the use of input from multiple sensors is an important aspect of an autonomous manipulation system. Useful sensors include video cameras, tactile arrays, force gauges and proximity sensors. In this report, we focus on tactile sensors. In tactile object recognition, it is necessary to determine the location and orientation of object edges and surfaces. We propose contr...

The phenomenon of change blindness (the surprising inability of people to correctly perceive changes between consecutively presented displays), primarily reported in vision, has recently been shown to occur for positional changes presented in tactile displays as well. Here, we studied people's ability to detect changes in the number of tactile stimuli in successively presented displays composed...

The perception of tactile stimuli presented on a moving hand is systematically suppressed. Such suppression has been attributed to the limited capacity of the brain to process task-irrelevant sensory information. Here, we examined whether humans do not only suppress movement-irrelevant but also enhance in parallel movement-relevant tactile signals when performing a goal-directed reaching moveme...

Several studies have established that humans orient their visual attention reflexively in response to social cues such as the direction of someone else's gaze. However, the consequences of this kind of orienting have been addressed only for the visual system. We investigated whether visual social attention cues can induce shifts in tactile attention by combining a central noninformative eye-gaz...

introduction: it was to compare the efficacy of semiannually fluoride varnish application versus pit and fissure sealant to reduce occlusal caries incidence. materials and methods: a randomized parallel designed study was conducted with 352 child-ren aged 6-7 years. participants were allocated into biannual application of varnish (n=179) (naf 5 %( durafluor, dentsply®, latin america) or resin-b...

Vestibular signals are strongly integrated with information from several other sensory modalities. For example, vestibular stimulation was reported to improve tactile detection. However, this improvement could reflect either a multimodal interaction or an indirect interaction driven by vestibular effects on spatial attention and orienting. Here we investigate whether natural vestibular activati...