Seeing with the skin

White, Benjamin W.; Saunders, Frank A.; Scadden, Lawrence A.; Bach-y-Rita, Paul; Collins, Carter C.

doi:10.3758/bf03210126

Cited by 205 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…In haptic perception, a possibly related phenomenon is the recent observation that synchronized sensations at multiple fingers can be perceptually collapsed into the percept of a single object (52). The haptic interfaces in many sensory-substitution devices supply sensory feedback to a different part of the body from the one driving the camera and receiving kinesthetic signals, and therefore tacitly rely on movement signal transfer (53)(54)(55)(56). Consequently, the signal transfer that we have documented in this study is of both fundamental and applied interest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Direct coupling of haptic signals between hands

Dupin

Hayward

Wexler

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Although motor actions can profoundly affect the perceptual interpretation of sensory inputs, it is not known whether the combination of sensory and movement signals occurs only for sensory surfaces undergoing movement or whether it is a more general phenomenon. In the haptic modality, the independent movement of multiple sensory surfaces poses a challenge to the nervous system when combining the tactile and kinesthetic signals into a coherent percept. When exploring a stationary object, the tactile and kinesthetic signals come from the same hand. Here we probe the internal structure of haptic combination by directing the two signal streams to separate hands: one hand moves but receives no tactile stimulation, while the other hand feels the consequences of the first hand's movement but remains still. We find that both discrete and continuous tactile and kinesthetic signals are combined as if they came from the same hand. This combination proceeds by direct coupling or transfer of the kinesthetic signal from the moving to the feeling hand, rather than assuming the displacement of a mediating object. The combination of signals is due to perception rather than inference, because a small temporal offset between the signals significantly degrades performance. These results suggest that the brain simplifies the complex coordinate transformation task of remapping sensory inputs to take into account the movements of multiple body parts in haptic perception, and they show that the effects of action are not limited to moving sensors.touch | haptics | perception | sensorimotor integration | kinesthesis M otor and kinesthetic signals arising from the movement of the eyes in the head, and translation of the eyes and ears in space due to head and body movements, have been shown to play an important role in visual (1-3) and auditory (4-6) perception. However, because of the small number of sensory surfaces in these modalities, and the rigid constraints on their movement, the number of kinesthetic degrees of freedom is limited. In active touch or the haptic modality (7-13), the large number of sensory surfaces, and the nearly unlimited ways these surfaces can move, lead to the question of how movement can be represented and associated with the cutaneous or tactile signals. To study how tactile and kinesthetic cues are combined to haptically perceive object shape and size, we created a novel haptic stimulus in which these cues were completely dissociated. This stimulus consisted of simulated triangles felt through a narrow slit, as in anorthoscopic perception in vision (14-16) or haptic perception (17), and as illustrated in Fig.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Direct coupling of haptic signals between hands

Dupin

Hayward

Wexler

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…The electronic system has been described elsewhere. 3 The present version, a 12612 array with a more simple electrode geometry, and larger arrays are planned.…”

Section: Sensory Substitutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theoretical aspects of sensory substitution and of neurotransmission-related reorganization in spinal cord injury

Bach-y-Rita

1999

Spinal Cord

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Spinal cord rehabilitation has progressed enormously since World War II, and persons with spinal cord injuries now have long life expectancies. Research has recently concentrated on improvement of the quality of life, and on neural mechanisms of recovery. This article will explore some aspects of both of these areas. In the ®rst section, the potential applications of sensory substitution systems for such functions as sex sensation and sensation from feet and from robotic hands will be examined. In the second section, the potential role of nonsynaptic di usion neurotransmission (NDN) in neural reorganization after spinal cord injury will be considered. This article includes portions of previous publications and reports.Keywords: incomplete SCI; neurotransmission; plasticity; robotic hand; sex sensation; rehabilitation Sensory substitutionBackground For the brain to correctly interpret information from devices, it is not necessary that it be presented in the same form as in natural sensory information systems. We do not SEE with the eyes; 1 the visual image does not go beyond the retina, where it is turned into patterns of pulses along nerves. Those individual pulses are not di erent from the pulses from the big toe. It is the brain which recreates the image from the patterns of pulses. We have previously demonstrated that the brain is able to recreate`visual' images that originate in an arti®cial receptor (a TV camera), which are transduced into a tactile display (the TVSS system), and carried to the brain via tactile nerve pathways. 1 Thus, it is only necessary to present the information from a device in a form of energy that can be mediated by the receptors at the man-machine interface, and for the brain, through a motor system (eg a head-mounted camera under the motor control of the neck muscles, for blind persons), to know the origin of the information. We have previously developed tactile vision substitution systems (TVSS) to deliver visual information to the brain via arrays of stimulators in contact with the skin of one of several parts of the body (abdomen, back, thigh, ®nger-tip). Optical images picked up by a TV camera are transduced into a form of energy (vibratory or direct electrical stimulation) that can be mediated by the skin receptors. The visual information reaches the perceptual levels for analysis and interpretation via somatosensory pathways and structures.After su cient training with the TVSS, our blind subjects reported experiencing the images in space, instead of on the skin. They learned to make perceptual judgments using visual means of analysis, such as perspective, parallax, looming and zooming, and depth judgments. Our studies with the TVSS have been extensively described. 1 ± 10 After training, our blind subjects using the TVSS system did not feel anything on the skin on which the interface was placed; rather they perceived it out in three dimensional space if they controlled the camera movement. Although the TVSS systems have only had between 100 and 1032 point arrays, the low res...

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“…Head movements were also found to improve directional accuracy when judgments depended upon tactile information alone (Frost & Richardson, 1976). In addition, it has been suggested that "externaliza-tion," or the ability to perceive an object as "out there" rather than existing at the receptor site, depends upon observer-induced changes in sensation such that these changes are lawfully related to the position of the distal stimulus and the movements of the observer (Wallach, 1938;White, Saunders, Scadden, Bach-y-Rita, & Collins, 1970). Subjects using the tactile localization device described above reported sensations similar to the "phantom" sensations described by Bekesy (1959).…”

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confidence: 51%