Obtaining information by dynamic (effortful) touching

Abstract

Dynamic touching is effortful touching. It entails deformation of muscles and fascia and activation of the embedded mechanoreceptors, as when an object is supported and moved by the body. It is realized as exploratory activities that can vary widely in spatial and temporal extents (a momentary heft, an extended walk). Research has revealed the potential of dynamic touching for obtaining nonvisual information about the body (e.g. limb orientation), attachments to the body (e.g. an object's height and width) and the relation of the body both to attachments (e.g. hand's location on a grasped object) and surrounding surfaces (e.g. places and their distances). Invariants over the exploratory activity (e.g. moments of a wielded object's mass distribution) seem to ground this 'information about'. The conception of a haptic medium as a nested tensegrity structure has been proposed to express the obtained information realized by myofascia deformation, by its invariants and transformations. The tensegrity proposal rationalizes the relative indifference of dynamic touch to the site of mechanical contact (hand, foot, torso or probe) and the overtness of exploratory activity. It also provides a framework for dynamic touching's fractal nature, and the finding that its degree of fractality may matter to its accomplishments.

Enlargement of Perceived Target Size: Intentional or Natural?

“…An index of how large the targets looked varied directly with an index of the accuracy of directing a projectile at those targets ( Lee, et al, 2012 ). Perhaps it is the player's haptic perception that is linked with the visual perception of size ( Turvey & Carello, 2011 ). The second experiment aimed to examine the mechanism by which the participants could perceive the goal as larger.…”

Modelling natural and artificial hands with synergies

“…The information about objects being effortfully supported or moved by the body, via mechanoreceptors embedded in the myofascial structure [30], is also apparently related to contact-from-force sensing, and suggests further investigations on how the overall posture and force distribution in a robot structure could be used to elicit useful information about the environment. Extrapolating from these ideas, one could speculate that the effects of gradually increasing the degree of constraints in the manual exploration process-in degrees varying from reducing the number of fingertips, to introducing compliant coverings, rigid finger splints, rigid fingertip sheaths, up to using rigid probes, as described in earlier studies [31,32]-could be regarded as rougher and rougher abstractions (i.e.…”

Extending mind, visuospatial integration, and the evolution of the parietal lobes in the human genus

“…In this sense, it is worth noting that the hand is the ultimate component of a corticospinal chain, which must be carefully considered when dealing with evolution and embodiment (Martín-Loeches, 2014). It is also worth nothing that the hand mediates a large set of cognitive responses which are self-sufficient to explore the affordance of an object by dynamic touching (Turvey and Carello, 2011), allowing a direct body (nonvisual) control of the brain-artefact interface.…”

“…There are several mechanical variables involved in this feedback, including the physical and spatial properties of the object, the way the hand touches the object, and the sensory input transmitted by the object when used to perceive or interact with the outer environment (see Turvey and Carello, 2011 for a detailed review). The body should be intended as a deformable interface receiving information from the external space, a perceptual system detecting information about internal and external inputs.…”