Experience Of Touch Research Articles

The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch, and Aesthetic Experience

The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch, and Aesthetic Experience

Taking Touch to New Frontiers: Why It Makes Sense and How to Make It Happen

Touch interfaces are appearing in everything from consumer devices to industrial equipment, not because touch is “in fashion,” but because it provides a truly better form of human‐device interaction. This article examines the advantages of gesture‐based touch interfaces and the key steps to building a device with a great touch experience.

Explaining Away the Body: Experiences of Supernaturally Caused Touch and Touch on Non-Hand Objects within the Rubber Hand Illusion

BackgroundIn rubber hand illusions and full body illusions, touch sensations are projected to non-body objects such as rubber hands, dolls or virtual bodies. The robustness, limits and further perceptual consequences of such illusions are not yet fully explored or understood. A number of experiments are reported that test the limits of a variant of the rubber hand illusion.Methodology/Principal FindingsA variant of the rubber hand illusion is explored, in which the real and foreign hands are aligned in personal space. The presence of the illusion is ascertained with participants' scores and temperature changes of the real arm. This generates a basic illusion of touch projected to a foreign arm. Participants are presented with further, unusual visuotactile stimuli subsequent to onset of the basic illusion. Such further visuotactile stimulation is found to generate very unusual experiences of supernatural touch and touch on a non-hand object. The finding of touch on a non-hand object conflicts with prior findings, and to resolve this conflict a further hypothesis is successfully tested: that without prior onset of the basic illusion this unusual experience does not occur.Conclusions/SignificanceA rubber hand illusion is found that can arise when the real and the foreign arm are aligned in personal space. This illusion persists through periods of no tactile stimulation and is strong enough to allow very unusual experiences of touch felt on a cardboard box and experiences of touch produced at a distance, as if by supernatural causation. These findings suggest that one's visual body image is explained away during experience of the illusion and they may be of further importance to understanding the role of experience in delusion formation. The findings of touch on non-hand objects may help reconcile conflicting results in this area of research. In addition, new evidence is provided that relates to the recently discovered psychologically induced temperature changes that occur during the illusion.

Illusory touch and tactile perception in somatoform dissociators

Objective The psychological mechanisms of somatoform dissociation (i.e., pseudoneurological symptoms) are poorly understood. This study evaluated recent theoretical predictions regarding the role of tactile perception in the development of somatoform dissociative symptoms. Methods Eighty nonclinical participants scoring either high or low on the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20) completed the Somatic Signal Detection Task (SSDT), a novel perceptual paradigm designed to simulate the occurrence of somatoform symptoms in the laboratory. Prior to the SSDT, participants completed a memory task designed to produce either minimal or maximal activation of tactile representations in memory. Results The high SDQ-20 group exhibited a more liberal response criterion ( c) on the SSDT than the low SDQ-20 group after controlling for negative affectivity, somatosensory amplification and depression. This effect was mainly attributable to an increased number of false alarms (i.e., illusory experiences of touch) in the high SDQ-20 group rather than an increased hit rate. General perceptual ability (i.e., tactile sensitivity) was comparable between the two groups. The memory manipulation had no effect on SSDT performance. Conclusions Somatoform dissociators appear more likely to experience illusory perceptual events under conditions of sensory ambiguity than nondissociators, despite comparable perceptual abilities more generally. These findings support theories that identify distorted perceptual processing as a feature of somatoform dissociation. The SSDT has potential as a tool for further research in this area.

Embracing Sculptural Ceramics: A Lived Experience of Touch in Art

ABSTRACTSculptural ceramic objects created by and for the body were made within the context of art-based research, in which theoretical explorations and studio practice were integrally interwoven. Studio explorations developed from theoretical knowledge gained from human physiology, and from the development of an understanding of the “lived experience” as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, through the experiences of the artist in making, and comments from visitors at exhibitions. The artworks challenge the visual hegemony of the art gallery by more fully engaging the body's sense of touch through the embrace. The sculptures, which were made by “casting hugs,” instinctively invite interaction, with soft curves that echo the human body, textures to visually entice individuals to touch, and a pleasurable weight that slows down responses. In public exhibition the artworks are enthusiastically embraced and held, broadening and articulating a tactile aesthetic for sculpture, and shifting focus from the sculptural objects themselves to one's physical and emotional experience of those objects.

The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership

This research finds that merely touching an object results in an increase in perceived ownership of that object. For nonowners, or buyers, perceived ownership can be increased with either mere touch or with imagery encouraging touch. Perceived ownership can also be increased through touch for legal owners, or sellers of an object. We also explore valuation of an object and conclude that it is jointly influenced by both perceived ownership and by the valence of the touch experience. We discuss the implications of this research for online and traditional retailers as well as for touch research and endowment effect research.

Articulating Blind Touch: Thinking through the Feet

ABSTRACTThrough reference to autobiographies of blindness and interview material with members of specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups this article aims to explore some of the problems of talking about the experience of touch. It reflects on how people with blindness are receptive to and articulate tactile impressions, and consideration is given to how the articulation of touch relates to certain discourses and stereotypes of touch and blindness. In so doing, the article highlights some of the ways in which the embodied experience of touch is mediated through language and makes the simple point that language does not simply convey tactile experience, it mediates its expression. With this research “problem” in mind I turn to how some interview participants drew attention to their feet—transcending the stereotype of blind touch as primarily associated with the hand. Some of the ways in which the impressions of the feet are talked about by people with blindness are revealed, including the way in which feet are part of embodied processes of immersion and forgetting as well as a source of contemplation, humor, visualization, and dreams.

Investigation of skin tribology and its effects on the tactile attributes of polymer fabrics

The most fundamental interaction between a user and a product is physical touch. In fact, a significant amount of the perceived value of a product results from the initial touch experience by the potential customer, whether the product is an automobile interior or a portable music player. Therefore, the ability to engineer a product's tactile character to produce favorable sensory perceptions has the potential to revolutionize product design. Another major consideration is the potential for products to produce friction-induced injuries to skin such as blistering. Progress in this field has been hindered by the difficulties in drawing correlations between human sensory outcomes (e.g. softness, smoothness, leather-like feel) and quantitative physical properties (e.g. friction coefficient, elastic modulus). In this paper, a framework is proposed to address this issue with regards to polymer fabrics, which are used everywhere from clothing to protective wound-care products, and results are reported. Human evaluators were used in a modified Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA) approach in order to identify four specific tactile attributes of fabric materials—sensible texture, abrasiveness, slipperiness, and fuzziness. The friction coefficients of the same fabrics against skin were measured by employing a three-axis dynamometer. The results were then correlated to sensory attributes by means of standard statistical methods. It was concluded from this work that human evaluators can score various fabrics along the above four tactile descriptors with significant statistical repeatability if “high” and “low” benchmark reference fabrics are made available during the evaluation. It was also observed that friction between fabric and skin is heavily dependent on both material type and fiber geometry, but that the impact of friction coefficient on tactility is still unclear. However, the methods presented in the paper may be used to further identify key fabric properties that are responsible for tactility.

Touchant-touché: The role of self-touch in the representation of body structure

The “body image” is a putative mental representation of one’s own body, including structural and geometric details, as well as the more familiar visual and affective aspects. Very little research has investigated how we learn the structure of our own body, with most researchers emphasising the canonical visual representation of the body when we look at ourselves in a mirror. Here, we used non-visual self-touch in healthy participants to investigate the possibility that primary sensorimotor experience may influence cognitive representations of one’s own body structure. Participants used the fingers of one hand (the ‘active’ hand), to touch the fingers of the other (the ‘passive’ hand). A conflict between the experience of the active and passive hand was introduced by experimenter interleaving their fingers with the fingers of the participant’s passive hand. This led to the active hand experiencing that it touched more fingers than the passive hand felt it was being touched by. The effects on representation of body structure were assessed using an implicit measure based on Kinsbourne and Warrington’s ‘in-between task’. We found an underestimation of the number of fingers in the central part of the hand specifically linked to the experience of self-touch. This pattern of results corresponds to the experience of the passive hand, but not the active hand. Nevertheless, comparable reorganisation of fingers within the hand representation was found for both active and passive hands. We show that primary sensorimotor experience can modify the representation of body structure. This modification is driven by the passive experience of being touched, rather than by the active experience of touching. We believe this is the first experimental study of effects of self-touch on the mental representation of the body.

Cognitive influences on the affective representation of touch and the sight of touch in the human brain

We show that the affective experience of touch and the sight of touch can be modulated by cognition, and investigate in an fMRI study where top-down cognitive modulations of bottom-up somatosensory and visual processing of touch and its affective value occur in the human brain. The cognitive modulation was produced by word labels, 'Rich moisturizing cream' or 'Basic cream', while cream was being applied to the forearm, or was seen being applied to a forearm. The subjective pleasantness and richness were modulated by the word labels, as were the fMRI activations to touch in parietal cortex area 7, the insula and ventral striatum. The cognitive labels influenced the activations to the sight of touch and also the correlations with pleasantness in the pregenual cingulate/orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. Further evidence of how the orbitofrontal cortex is involved in affective aspects of touch was that touch to the forearm [which has C fiber Touch (CT) afferents sensitive to light touch] compared with touch to the glabrous skin of the hand (which does not) revealed activation in the mid-orbitofrontal cortex. This is of interest as previous studies have suggested that the CT system is important in affiliative caress-like touch between individuals.

Touch Memories and the Influence of Gender

ABSTRACTThe way we perceive and experience touch is a first step in understanding how touch influences design and designers. Early memories of touch were explored among male and female design students taking classes at a large US metropolitan university. Male and female students were compared in terms of recall of what was touched and how it felt. Response categories of what was touched were similar between males and females, although contexts and exposures differed. Specific sensations were analyzed and categorized. Results pointed to the influence of a gender discourse within a culture that takes place in defining touch experiences more than differences arising from being male or female. Experiences of touch need to be expanded, made explicit, and understood in terms of design and creativity.

Visual enhancement of touch and the bodily self

We experience our own body through both touch and vision. We further see that others’ bodies are similar to our own body, but we have no direct experience of touch on others’ bodies. Therefore, relations between vision and touch are important for the sense of self and for mental representation of one’s own body. For example, seeing the hand improves tactile acuity on the hand, compared to seeing a non-hand object. While several studies have demonstrated this visual enhancement of touch (VET) effect, its relation to the ‘bodily self’, or mental representation of one’s own body remains unclear. We examined whether VET is an effect of seeing a hand, or of seeing my hand, using the rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, a prosthetic hand which is brushed synchronously—but not asynchronously—with one’s own hand is felt to actually be one’s hand. Thus, we manipulated whether or not participants felt like they were looking directly at their hand, while holding the actual stimulus they viewed constant. Tactile acuity was measured by having participants judge the orientation of square-wave gratings. Two characteristic effects of VET were observed: (1) cross-modal enhancement from seeing the hand was inversely related to overall tactile acuity, and (2) participants near sensory threshold showed significant improvement following synchronous stroking, compared to asynchronous stroking or no stroking at all. These results demonstrate a clear functional relation between the bodily self and basic tactile perception.

Clothed Landscape of Memories

ABSTRACTHandmade clothes are remembered: wearing a pullover knitted specially for you is a deeply touching experience. The aim of this paper is to discuss memories of clothing, in the context of craft.In order to understand the nature of clothing memories, the prospect-refuge theory presented by geographer Appleton (1975, 1988) is applied. Appleton has elaborated his extended theory for landscape assessment. The central idea is that human environments are assessed in terms of the opportunities they afford for observation and for being observed. An unimpeded opportunity to see and observe is called a prospect; an opportunity to hide, a refuge. (Appleton, 1975, 1988; Crozier, 1994) In addition, environments always contain hazards as a threat to seeing and hiding possibilities. Crozier (1994, pp.17-19) has pointed out that the need for prospect and refuge can be fulfilled at a symbolic level and metaphorically. In this paper, Appleton's concepts are understood as a means of regulating one's relationship to the clothing environment metaphorically: landscape is turned into mindscape.The data consists of first-person accounts of experience: autobiographical memories of clothing and essays on favourite clothes. The texts are analyzed using qualitative content analysis. In this paper, the contents of the concepts of Appleton's theory are discussed in relation to craft.The memories of handmade clothing involve strongly mixed emotions: some descriptions are full of pride and pleasure, while others describe feelings of shame and inferiority. Craft as such affords a sense of prospect, either positive or negative. The mixed emotions also point out the characteristics of hazard that craft includes: the process is always somewhat unpredictable in terms of outcome. The contents of memories suggest that the hazard ‘effect’ includes human relations. The outcome is not merely a physical object, but a representation of parental love, for example.The memories of clothing crafted for oneself show that craft provides a possibility for affirming a sense of continuity with one's self-experience. The production process is also a powerful medium for improving one's environment in a direction desired: towards a sense of prospect, refuge - or more hazards. The mindscape of crafted clothes is built with strong emotions and experiences of making and people entangled in the processes, as well as with an understanding of self-identity.

Touch and Go Joe: an adolescent’s experience of OCD Joe Wells Touch and Go Joe: an adolescent’s experience of OCD Jessica Kingsley No of pages: 128£9.9918431039151843103915

From 1 to 2 per cent of the UK population has obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Despite this, there are few books that describe the experience of living with this condition. With a foreword by Isobel Heyman, an international authority on childhood OCD, this book is written in an informal and accessible manner.

Recovering landscape: an art between seeing and hearing

Cultural geographers have recently argued that landscape is experienced in an embodied way through a complex weave of senses: including sight, sound, smell, touch and social organization and experience. This has led to calls for a reassessment of hearing as a ‘way of dwelling’. The article focuses on music to question Lucy Lippard's 1997 book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society — seen by many as a key text in relation to the interaction between visual art, social activism and cultural geography — asking why, in its 292 pages, there are no more than half a dozen references to music. Lippard's claim that place is for her ‘the locus of desire’ is rendered problematic because, as Janet Wolff demonstrates, the music that we listen to, particularly in our teens, plays a key part in locating us in the life world. Given Lippard's deliberate weaving of her own experience into the text, what might the absence of music suggest? Using the work of Rebecca Solnit, the article offers a hypothesis about the underlying orientation of Lippard's text with regard to a ‘politics of listening’. It then takes up points raised in relation to Lippard and Solnit in the more specific context of a recent AHRB-funded project. The aim here is to suggest ways in which our understanding of landscape might be extended by working between a sense of sight and sound as a means to deploy what Richard Kearney refers to as the ‘testimonial imagination’.

Upplevelser av kroppslig beroring i omvardnadsarbetet -- patienter berattar

The purpose of this study was to illustrate how patients described their experiences of physical touch within the everyday care. Eight patients were interviewed; three women and five men, all recei...

Zen awareness in the teaching of palpation: An osteopathic perspective

Summary Teaching and learning manual diagnosis and treatment create a mutual challenge to both the student and master in communicating. The perception of, and action based on, the information gained by palpation is pre-verbal. However, communication between patient and practitioner, as well as charting and billing, require the translation of this information into a recordable form by the use of cognitive constructs—ideas, words, treatment models and illustrative analogies. These intellectual tools sometime assist but sometime mislead the treating person and patient when the distinction is lost between the original experience and the interpretation. For convenience the constructs evolve into rules which then create expectations that become barriers to the appreciation of the experience of touch and the real state of tissue. In teaching and practice, with few exceptions, the conceptual models are stressed with limited recognition of variation in perception or the actualities of the perceptual process itself. Another challenge is the expression in several practice traditions, including osteopathy, of the integration within the person (patient as well as practitioner) of body, mind and spirit. However, practical application beyond a compartmentalized complementary approach remains a challenge. And although many people recognize the importance of an intention to do well, implementation strategies for working efficaciously with intentionality, or in the realm of mind, appear barely credible or even esoteric. Teaching is often cumbersome. For this author the challenges presented in the more difficult aspects of manual practice mirror the challenges in the Zen Buddhist tradition in teaching the way to enlightened living and practice. But in this centuries-old tradition there are solutions that we may borrow to meet the challenges cited above. Besides promoting serene mental focus, Zen is the foundation of many martial arts including Samurai swordsmanship. In these disciplines mind, heart and hands work together in practical and critical ways. Teaching in this context involves student meeting master and beginning a journey to overcome the barrier between conceptual and tactical analysis on the one hand and the deeper reality which can enhance effectiveness in practice. This article introduces to osteopathy, and manual practice generally, some of these terms and tactics from Zen, hoping to develop an appreciation of the common challenges of perception, action, and communication in both disciplines. In this context, the role of practitioner's awareness is discussed as a means of directing action. Illustrations of attempts to reconcile biomechanics and mental focus in past and current osteopathic literature are cited to help define the problem. It is suggested that a better recognition of the problem of joining perception, intention and action may lead to a change in teaching strategies within the western manual healing arts to better integrate the work of our hands, hearts and minds.

Bodily Illusions Modulate Tactile Perception

Touch differs from other exteroceptive senses in that the body itself forms part of the tactile percept. Interactions between proprioception and touch provide a powerful way to investigate the implicit body representation underlying touch. Here, we demonstrate that an intrinsic primary quality of a tactile object, for example its size, is directly affected by the perceived size of the body part touching it. We elicited proprioceptive illusions that the left index finger was either elongating or shrinking by vibrating the biceps or triceps tendon of the right arm while subjects grasped the tip of their left index finger. Subjects estimated the distance between two simultaneous tactile contacts on the left finger during tendon vibration. We found that tactile distances feel bigger when the touched body part feels elongated. Control tests showed that the modulation of touch was linked to the perceived index-finger size induced by tendon vibration. Vibrations that did not produce proprioceptive illusion had no effect on touch. Our results show that the perception of tactile objects is referenced to an implicit body representation and that proprioception contributes to this body representation. We also provide, for the first time, a quantitative, implicit measure of distortions of body size.

Positive touch, the implications for parents and their children with autism: an exploratory study

The aims of this study were (1) to explore the experience of touch between parents and children with autism before, during, and after a Training and Support Programme (TSP), and (2) to develop a model of the process of touch therapy for this group of parents and children. Fourteen parents and their children agreed to take part in the study. Five of these parents withdrew. Reasons for withdrawal included personal circumstances and ill health. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews with parents before attending the TSP and Home Record Sheets completed by parents during the TSP. Results indicate that before the TSP touch was experienced as out of parents' control. During the TSP, the experience of touch appeared to change. A key benefit gained by parents was the feeling of closeness to children. The key benefits gained by children were perceived by the parents as improved sleep patterns, children were more relaxed after receiving the massage and appeared more amenable to touch. Of interest was children's request for massage at home. At 16-week follow-up both parents and children continue to enjoy giving and receiving touch therapy, respectively.

A review of the use and clinical effectiveness of touch as a nursing intervention

summary The objective of this literature review is to explore the use and effectiveness of touch as a distinct aspect of nurse patient communication. Nurses’ use of touch, the impact of touch and the experiences of touch are explored. Touching is a regarded as a special type of non-verbal communication. It is an intimate action that implies an invasion of the individuals’ personal and private space. The practice of nursing involves a high level of human contact encompassing many activities such as bathing a patient, that require a physical aspect in their operation. Touch has been muted as a valuable channel of non-verbal communication in nursing and students are advised of its potential theoretical benefits to clients. Touch has been linked to the phenomenon of caring [Clifford, C., 1995. Caring: fitting the concept to nursing practice. Journal of Advanced Nursing (4), 37–41; Chang, S.O., 2001. The conceptual structure of physical touch in caring. Journal of Advanced Nursing 33(6), 820–827; Bassett, C., 2002. Nurses’ perceptions of care and caring. International Journal of Nursing Practice 8, 8–15] and is suggested to enhance the nurse patient relationship [Arnold, E., Underman Boggs, K., 1999. Interpersonal Relationships. Professional Communication Skills for Nurses. third ed. W.B. Saunders Company, London]. However, the evidence base for this practice is less convincing. The objective of this review is to explore the evidence base that underpins the use of touch in nursing practice and use this knowledge to inform practice. The main objective of the review is to examine the use and clinical effectiveness of touch as a nursing intervention. Little empirical evidence exists that supports the use of touch as a nursing intervention per se, and ambiguity exists with regard to its perception by both patients and nurses. Widespread adoption of touch as a caring intervention is discouraged in the absence of research evidence and clear guidelines for practice.