Experimental and Theoretical Researches of Fine Surface-Texture Discrimination Ability in Tactile Sensation.

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This study consists of three researches. The first research was a theoretical one in wihch the fine surface-texture discrimination was situated in the tactile information processing system. The second research was an experiment designed to prove the validity of the amplitude information hypothesis, in which it was asserted that the subjects discriminated the fine surface texures using the amplitude information of surface unevenness. The third research was composed of two experiments. The purpose of this research was to investigate the spatial summation effects and the skin temperature effects on the discrimination ability of fine surface textures.The first research revealed that the tactile information processing system was classified into four sub-systems which showed mutually independent processing of the information. The fine surface-texture discrimination system was one of the four subsystems. In the second research the experiment of ridge height discrimination was performed. If the subjects discriminated the ridge heights using the amplitude information of the stimuli, the values of the difference thresholds of the ridge heights were the same as the difference threshold values of fine surface-textures. The results of the experiment supported the amplitude information hypothesis. The third research showed that the clear spatial summation was observed in the fine surface-texture discrimination tasks and that there existed little temperature dependent changes in the difference thresholds of fine surface-texture discrimination tasks.