2008 Woodie Awards
Brain uses sense of touch to see the world
Issue date: 4/3/08
Have you ever wondered how your brain distinguishes between objects? We are all aware of the edges of a textbook, the curves of a coffee cup and the orientation of a pencil in relation to paper.
Our brains can perceive the shape of an object not only when we see it (visual stimulation) but also when we touch it (tactile stimulation).
Researchers from the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute on the Homewood campus examined how slight differences in the orientation of an object are perceived by sensory information from the fingers.
We rely on our sense of touch, or our somatosensory system, to interact with other objects in the world. When we touch an ice cube, receptors in our hand let the brain know that the ice is cold.
We can feel the smoothness of a piece of glass, the sharp corners of a table, the roundness of a ball and countless other tactile perceptions.
Results recently published in the journal Somatosensory and Motor Research show evidence of a sensory threshold in a person's ability to determine differences in the orientation of bars and edges.
Imagine that you are holding a pencil. You are aware if this pencil is vertical, perhaps ready to write something on a page. You would also be able to feel if the pencil is horizontal and you are about to pick it up from your desk.
The researchers wanted to examine the adeptness of the sensory receptors in a person's fingers, and subsequent processing in the higher-level cortex, at distinguishing between slightly different angles of a bar.
They used a fingerpad, which consisted of individual pins, in order to simulate the types of surfaces normally encountered. A person places one finger on this pad, which contains 400 tiny pins in a small area.
In one experiment, the fingerpad presented a bar in different orientations, varying by a fixed number of degrees. For example, several of the pins would become elevated in a horizontal line at zero degrees.
Subjects would then have to choose an image that corresponded to the orientation of the bar that they perceived.
Our brains can perceive the shape of an object not only when we see it (visual stimulation) but also when we touch it (tactile stimulation).
Researchers from the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute on the Homewood campus examined how slight differences in the orientation of an object are perceived by sensory information from the fingers.
We rely on our sense of touch, or our somatosensory system, to interact with other objects in the world. When we touch an ice cube, receptors in our hand let the brain know that the ice is cold.
We can feel the smoothness of a piece of glass, the sharp corners of a table, the roundness of a ball and countless other tactile perceptions.
Results recently published in the journal Somatosensory and Motor Research show evidence of a sensory threshold in a person's ability to determine differences in the orientation of bars and edges.
Imagine that you are holding a pencil. You are aware if this pencil is vertical, perhaps ready to write something on a page. You would also be able to feel if the pencil is horizontal and you are about to pick it up from your desk.
The researchers wanted to examine the adeptness of the sensory receptors in a person's fingers, and subsequent processing in the higher-level cortex, at distinguishing between slightly different angles of a bar.
They used a fingerpad, which consisted of individual pins, in order to simulate the types of surfaces normally encountered. A person places one finger on this pad, which contains 400 tiny pins in a small area.
In one experiment, the fingerpad presented a bar in different orientations, varying by a fixed number of degrees. For example, several of the pins would become elevated in a horizontal line at zero degrees.
Subjects would then have to choose an image that corresponded to the orientation of the bar that they perceived.
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