Project Details
Projekt
The representation of touch in space
Applicant
Dr. Stephanie Badde
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
from 2015 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278626289
This proposal addresses the localization of touch in continuous space. To derive the position of a tactile stimulus in space, the brain has to integrate its location on the skin with body posture information. Both of these signals are noisy and likely biased towards certain locations. We will test whether the combination of these incomplete, individual signals accounts for the high amount of touch localization errors found in previous studies. Notably, in previous studies participants always chose the location of the stimulus out of a small set of possible positions. In contrast, we will ask participants to freely indicate the position of the tactile stimuli in space. During the evaluation of the combination of the two constituent single cues, the location of touch on the skin and arm posture, we will investigate the influence of sensor-independent, learned expectations of certain positions (priors) on touch localization in space. Moreover, it will be tested whether single-cue information is lost during the estimation of the tactile location in space.In the final part of the project, the role of vision for haptic localization will be addressed. We expect haptic localization to be recalibrated after exposure to spatially discordant visual-haptic stimulation and estimate parameters of the recalibration process.All questions will be addressed with psychophysical experiments and modeling of the resulting data within a Bayesian framework.As a whole the planned research will provide the first formal characterization of tactile localization in continuous space considering all sources of information and, thus, greatly advance our understanding of the representation of space in touch.
DFG Programme
Research Fellowships
International Connection
USA
