2014年04月23日　　17:00 〜 18:00

Nanobio Bld. 1F Conference room

心理物理で探る触覚の時間とテクスチャ

黒木 忍

NTT コミュニケーション科学基礎研究所

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.