Shinob Kuroki: “How do we perceive timing and texture in touch? -psychophysical approach”

April 23, 2014  17:00 〜 18:00

Nanobio Bld. 1F Conference room《please note》

心理物理で探る触覚の時間とテクスチャ

Shinob Kuroki

NTT Communication Science Laboratories

The tactile system senses a variety of surface properties from vibrations given to the skin. While past studies have shown that neural activity of tactile afferents beautifully preserves the temporal structure of input stimuli, little attention has been paid to how they contribute our temporal perception. In this talk, I introduce our recent research that 1) the tactile timing system cannot make use of vibration phase information carried by temporal structure of neural responses; 2) the tactile frequency is mainly calculated by temporal pattern of each mechanoreceptor-afferent channels, which encode either low- or high-frequency vibrations, but it can also be estimated by integrating information from distinct channels.