Cutaneous Perception of Form

Deaf and Hearing Children's Performance on a Tactual Perception Battery

“…Inspection of Fig. The sensitivity difference between these skin areas has been documented previously (e.g., Major, 1898;Ruch, 1951), and the increasing and decreasing funcrions for rhe palmar area may reflect the inirially lower sensidviry of that area, alrhough the fingerrip values obtained in the present study were nor nearly so low as those obtained by Ringel and Ewanowski ( 1965) and Ruch ( 1951) using rrained adulr observers. The significance of these trends is indicared by the Deaf/Hearing X Age inreracrion.…”

“…greater than those found in the literature (e.g., Major, 1898;Ringel & Ewanowski, 1965;Ruch, 1951) probably due to our use of naive Ss rather than the trained observers used in classical psychophysical experiments. Two-point threshold.-The findings with two-point thresholds (aesthesiometer) also confirm previous work with this classical measure, although values obtained were 1 to 2 rnm.…”

Discrimination of tactual stimuli.

“…The writer's aim in his current research is to investigate the possibility of coding controls in terms of variations in textures of the control's surface. That such application of the tactual sense seems reasonable is indicated by the results of investigations reported by Major (5), Zigler and Barrett (7), and Zigler and Northrup (8). More recently Austin and Sleight (1) have indicated some of the potentialities of the tactual sense.…”

Accuracy of tactual discrimination of letters, numerals, and geometric forms.

“…First, there have been experiments determining the relative sensitivity of various parts of the body. In general, it may be said that the arm is more sensitive than the thigh (2), the palm more sensitive than the forearm (3,6), the thumb and finger tip more sensitive than the palm (3, S, 6), and the tongue the most sensitive of all (3, S). Major (3) has studied tactual sensitivity of the lips but admits that finger-tip sensitivity is more effective.…”