Sergiu Tcaci Popescu, Jason Achille Khoury, J. Kevin O’Regan, Matej Hoffmann
When a nuisance on our skin bothers us, we reach to stop it without looking thanks to our ability to do tactile localization. In adults, this has predominantly been studied with short stimuli that extinguish before participants can reach them. In a more ecological situation the touch would last until we reach it. In the study presented here we compare localizing temporary and continuous vibrotactile stimuli (on the forearm and upper arm). We expected better performance with continuous stimuli because the information about their location is continuously available until the localization response. We also expected proximity between stimuli and body landmarks (e.g., wrists, elbows) to affect localization response. In some studies, body landmarks facilitate tactile localization in their vicinity. In a preliminary pilot study (4 participants), we found that continuous stimuli were not localized better than temporary stimuli and that tactile localizations seemed biased away from body landmarks, showing no improvement in accuracy. The unexpected results could have been due to insufficiency of data. We started conducting the main experiment and are presenting the new preliminary results including data of around 15 new participants.
DFG SPP "The Active Self" 