Cuteanous texture information influences kinaesthetic movement direction W Bergmann Tiest, A Kappers |
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Faculty of Human Movement Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands
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| In haptics, like in vision, a moving grating perceived through an aperture is interpreted as moving in the direction perpendicular to the orientation of the stripes, regardless of the actual movement direction [Bicchi et al, 2008, Brain Research Bulletin, 75, 737—741; Pei et al, 2008, PNAS, 105(23), 8130—8135]. This was shown in passive perception, with the hand stationary and the grating moving. Our question was, whether this is also the case with the hand moving over a stationary grating. In that situation, two movement direction cues are available that might contain conflicting information: a kinaesthetic cue from the limbs and joints, and a cutaneous cue from the finger touching the grating. We measured the relative contribution of these two cues in an experiment. Blindfolded subjects were asked to move their finger parallel to either the frontoparallel or the midsaggital plane over a grating that was oriented either +45° or -45° from the instructed movement direction. A significant difference in actual movement direction (p = 0.0099) was found for the radial movement, depending on the orientation of the grating. On average, 4±1 (mean±SE) percent of the movement direction is based on cutaneous input, and the rest on kinaesthetic input. [This work has been partially supported by the European Commission with the Collaborative Project no. 248587, "THE Hand Embodied", within the FP7-ICT-2009-4-2-1 program "Cognitive Systems and Robotics"] |
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