Human tactile detection of within and inter-finger spatiotemporal phase shifts of low-frequency vibrations
Human tactile detection of within and inter-finger spatiotemporal phase shifts of low-frequency vibrations
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DOI：
10.1038/s41598-018-22774-z
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发表时间：
2018-03-09
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Nishida, Shin'ya
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kuroki, Scinob;Nishida, Shin'ya
当我们触摸一个物体时，皮肤会复制它的表面形状/纹理，并且这种变形模式会根据物体的移动而变化。这种移位模式直接编码事件的时空“运动”信息，并且已经在其他模态中被检测到（例如，听觉的耳间时间差和视觉的一阶运动）。由于以往的研究表明，机械感受器传入通道与小的感受野和缓慢的时间特性有助于触觉运动知觉，我们试图挖掘的时空处理器使用低频正弦波作为原始探针在我们以前的研究。然而，我们发现在相邻手指上呈现的正弦波对的重叠很难检测。在这里，利用小的感受野，我们调查了手指内的运动，发现当观察者用一个手指触摸局部正弦波刺激时，阈值性能以上。虽然观察者不能从感知上区分运动，适应发生在一个方向敏感的方式：运动/异步检测受损，适应异步刺激在同一方向上移动。这些发现是一致的一种可能性，即人类可以直接编码的皮肤变形的短程时空模式，通过使用相移的低频分量，除了检测短期和长期的运动，使用能量转移的高频分量。
When we touch an object, the skin copies its surface shape/texture, and this deformation pattern shifts according to the objects movement. This shift pattern directly encodes spatio-temporal "motion" information of the event, and has been detected in other modalities (e.g., inter-aural time differences for audition and first-order motion for vision). Since previous studies suggested that mechanoreceptor-afferent channels with small receptive field and slow temporal characteristics contribute to tactile motion perception, we tried to tap the spatio-temporal processor using low-frequency sine-waves as primitive probes in our previous study. However, we found that asynchrony of sine-wave pair presented on adjacent fingers was difficult to detect. Here, to take advantage of the small receptive field, we investigated within-finger motion and found above threshold performance when observers touched localized sine-wave stimuli with one finger. Though observers could not perceptually discriminate rightward from leftward motion, the adaptation occurred in a direction-sensitive way: the motion/asynchronous detection was impaired by adapting to asynchronous stimuli moving in the same direction. These findings are consistent with a possibility that human can directly encode short-range spatio-temporal patterns of skin deformation by using phase-shifted low-frequency components, in addition to detecting short- and long-range motion using energy shifts of high-frequency components.