Sequences of auditory beeps and tactile taps were simultaneously presented and participants were instructed to focus on one of these modalities and to ignore the other. We tested whether (i) the two sensory channels bias one another and (ii) the interaction depends on the relative reliability of the channels. Audition biased tactile perception and touch biased auditory perception. Lowering the ...

People with autism and Asperger syndrome are anecdotally said to be hypersensitive to touch. In two experiments, we measured tactile thresholds and suprathreshold tactile sensitivity in a group of adults with Asperger syndrome. In the first experiment, tactile perceptual thresholds were measured. Two frequencies of vibrotactile stimulation were used: 30 and 200 Hz. The results demonstrated sign...

The present studies examined whether implied tactile properties during language comprehension influence subsequent direct tactile perception, and the specificity of any such effects. Participants read sentences that implicitly conveyed information regarding tactile properties (e.g., Grace tried on a pair of thick corduroy pants while shopping) that were either related or unrelated to fabrics an...

This study investigated the presence of, and relationship between tactile dysfunction and upper limb motor function in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) compared to typical developing (TD) children. Participants were 36 children aged 6-12 years. Presence of DCD (n=20) or TD (n=16) was confirmed using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children, second edition. All childre...

A major goal in perceptual neuroscience is to understand how signals from different sensory modalities are combined to produce stable and coherent representations. We previously investigated interactions between audition and touch, motivated by the fact that both modalities are sensitive to environmental oscillations. In our earlier study, we characterized the effect of auditory distractors on ...

In conventional minimally invasive robotic surgery (MIRS) the physician is no longer in direct mechanical contact with the patient and the surgical instruments. The establishment of kinesthetic impressions shows promising results technically but tactile feedback is still a problem. Various attempts with full remote perception of tactile impressions did not prevail for a number of reasons. Above...

We created 59 tactile melodies by transforming pieces of music from the auditory domain to the vibrotactile domain. Sixteen observers judged these tactile melodies on a set of 16 characteristics such as ‘melodious’, ‘bombastic’, and ‘alarming’. By using advanced multivariate statistical methods, we distilled two main underlying dimensions of the tactile melodies. We interpreted these dimensions...

The simultaneous perception of multimodal information in the environment during voluntary movement is very important for effective reactions to the environment. Previous studies have found that voluntary movement affects the simultaneous perception of auditory and tactile stimuli. However, the results of these experiments are not completely consistent, and the differences may be attributable to...

Neuroimaging techniques may aid in the identification of areas of the human brain that are involved in tactile shape perception. Bodegård et al. (2001) relate differences in the properties of tactile stimuli to differences in areas of cortical activation to infer tactile processing in the somatosensory network.

In this study of lipreading with supplementary tactile input, normally hearing subjects with noise masking were presented with tactile information relating to the voiced/unvoiced contrast. Considerable training was required before subjects were able to make use of this information so as to gain higher scores for lipreading with tactile Supplement than for lipreading alone . These results are in...