Abstract
To obtain accurate surface information about an object by touch, we have to selectively attend to one source of tactile sensory information while ignoring the influence of others that occur at the same time (e.g., the sensation of of a shirt sleeve contacting the skin.) To investigate how the brain isolates different events, we examined the frequency discrimination performance using vibrotactile stimuli presented to one finger while presenting distractor stimuli to another finger. Results show that the perceived frequency of target stimulus shifted toward the frequency of the distractor. The shift of perceived frequency occurred even when the distractor was presented to the other hand. Meanwhile, the distractor effect disappeared when the onset of the distractor was prior to that of the target stimulus. Our results indicate the possibility that the brain uses temporal synchrony between stimuli as a strong cue to associate multiple stimuli as a single event.
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Kuroki, S., Watanabe, J., Nishida, S. (2014). Vibrotactile Frequency Discrimination Performance with Cross-Channel Distractors. In: Auvray, M., Duriez, C. (eds) Haptics: Neuroscience, Devices, Modeling, and Applications. EuroHaptics 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8618. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44193-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44193-0_9
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