Towards Understanding Human Skin Sensations

Abstract

Human fingertips are amazingly sensitive. They can easily detect a single strand of hair that has fallen onto a desktop and distinguish between metal surfaces that have been polished to different degrees. Our group uses perceptual psychology methods to study tactile sensory mechanisms. This article introduces tactile illusions that illustrate how the tactile sensory system processes information and provides stable perception. This line of research is expected to yield efficient information-presentation techniques.