Lecture 23

SENSE OF TOUCH
Topic: 97-99
Topic No. 97
Sense of Touch
The sense of touch is also called the cutaneous senses. These are important for following reason;
 Sense of touch gives us information about environment
o The perceptions we experience through our skin are crucial for carrying out everyday
activities

 Protecting ourselves from injury

 Motivating sexual activity

 Providing and receiving comfort

 Maintaining temperature

Somatosensory System
(1) The cutaneous senses, which are responsible for perceptions such as touch and pain, caused
by stimulation of the skin
(2) Proprioception is the ability to sense the position of the body and limbs
(3) Kinesthesis, the ability to sense the movement of the body and limbs.
These perceptions are crucial to our survival and to the survival of our species.
We experience pain

We can detect texture and temperature

Proprioception and Kinesis

The Skin
The “monumental facade of the human body”, Comel (1953)
 The heaviest organ in the human body, one of the largest and most obvious

 Warning function, prevents body fluids from escaping, protects us by keeping bacteria,
chemical agents, and dirt from penetrating our bodies.

 Maintains the integrity of what’s inside and protects us from what’s outside
 Also provides us with information about the various stimuli that contact it.

 The sun’s rays heat our skin, and we feel warmth; whereas a pinprick is painful;

 When someone touches us, we experience pressure or other sensations

 Merkel receptor and the Meissner corpuscle located close to surface, i.e., epidermis

 Merkel receptor senses the fine details, whereas Meissner corpuscle controls the
handgrip

  The Ruffini cylinder and Pacinian corpuscle located deeper in the skin

 The Ruffini cylinder responds continuously to stimulation

 The Pacinian corpuscle responds when

 The Ruffini cylinder, associated with perceiving stretching of the skin

 The Pacinian corpuscle with sensing rapid vibrations and fine texture
Topic No. 98
Perceiving Details
Pathways of Cutaneous Senses
 Nerve fibers from receptors in the skin travel in bundles called peripheral nerves that
enter the spinal cord through the dorsal root

 The nerve fibers then go up the spinal cord along two major pathways: the medial
lemniscal pathway and the spinothalamic pathway
The medial lemniscus and the spinothalamic tract
These pathways synapse in the ventrolateral nucleus of the thalamus and then send fibers to the
somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobe.
 Lemniscal pathway, large fibers carry signals related to sensing the positions of the limbs
(proprioception) and perceiving touch

 The spinothalamic pathway, smaller fibers that transmit signals related to temperature and
pain

 Lan Waterman lost the ability to feel touch and to sense the positions of his limbs (lemniscal
pathway), but was still able to sense pain and temperature (spinothalamic pathway)

(a) The sensory homunculus on the somatosensory cortex. Parts of the body with the highest
tactile acuity are represented by larger areas on the cortex.
(b) The somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobe. The primary somatosensory area, S1 receives
inputs from the ventrolateral nucleus of the thalamus. The secondary somatosensory area, S2 is
partially hidden behind the temporal lobe. (Adapted from Penfield & Rasmussen, 1950.

The Braille alphabet consists of raised dots in a 2 x 3 matrix. The large dots indicate the location
of the raised dot for each letter. Blind people read these dots by scanning them with their
fingertips.
Tactile Acuity
Tactile Acuity is the ability to detect details on the skin. Two-point Touch Threshold refers to
detecting whether a sharp point on skin is one or two. Grating acuity refers to detecting direction
of the grooves in a bar whether these are vertical or horizontal. experiments in psychophysics test
these thresholds to understand under what conditions and at what distance two points can be
accurately perceived.

Correlation between density of Merkel receptors and tactile acuity

(a) When a vibrating pressure stimulus is applied to the Pacinian corpuscle, it transmits these
pressure vibrations to the nerve fiber. (b) When a continuous pressure stimulus is applied to the
Pacinian corpuscle, it does not transmit the continuous pressure to the fiber.
(c) Lowenstein determined how the fiber fired to stimulation of the corpuscle (at A) and to direct
stimulation of the fiber (at B )
Vibration plays the role in perceiving details of tactile stimulation and vibration is based on
physiological activity. Pacinian corpuscle (PC), fibers respond poorly to slow or constant
pushing, but respond well to high rates of vibration. It is made of layers. Texture and its details
like roughness and smoothness are also perceived this way.
Spatial Cues mean relatively large surface elements, such as bumps and grooves. Temporal
Cues means vibration by skin moving on a surface (Katz, 1925).

Topic No. 99
Physiology of Tactile Perception

(a) Participants perceived the roughness of two fine surfaces to be essentially the same when felt
with stationary fingers (b) could perceive the difference between the two surfaces when they
were allowed to move their fingers. Hollins and Reisner (2000).

Eliminating the action of fibers associated with the Meissner corpuscle by adaptation to a 10-Hz
vibration had no effect on perception of a fine texture, but eliminating the action of the Pacinian
corpuscle by adapting to a 250-Hz vibration eliminated the ability to sense the fine textures.
 Active touch—touch in which a person actively explores an object, usually with fingers and
hands.

 Passive touch, occurs when touch stimuli are applied to the skin

 Haptic perception— in which three-dimensional objects are explored with the hand
Haptic perception highly complex. It involves
(1) the sensory system, involved in detecting cutaneous sensations such as touch,
temperature, and texture and the movements and positions of fingers and hands
(2) the motor system, involved in moving fingers and hands
(3) the cognitive system, which was involved in thinking about the information provided by
the sensory and motor systems.

Some of the exploratory procedures (EPs) observed by Lederman and Klatzky as participants
identified objects.

(a) Response of fibers in the fingertips to touching a high-curvature stimulus. The height of
the profile indicates the firing rate at different places across the fingertip. (b) The profile of
firing to touching a stimulus with more gentle curvature. Some neurons in cortex with center
surround receptive fields and others that respond to more specialized stimulation of the skin.
  Some neurons in cortex with center surround receptive fields and others that respond to
more specialized stimulation of the skin.
 Attention and Cortical Neurons stimulation of the receptors may trigger a response, but
the size of the response can then be affected by processes such as attention, thinking, and
other actions of the perceiver.

The response of a neuron in a monkey’s parietal cortex that fires when the monkey grasps a ruler
but that does not fire when the monkey grasps a cylinder.