DaVinci's Touch: Is there a relation between sight and sensation?
It’s common knowledge that the senses of taste and smell are interrelated, that both affect one another. Anyone who’s had a bad cold can attest to this. But what about connections between the other senses? Surely, touch and hearing aren’t related? Touch and sight?
Actually, there may be a link between the senses of touch and sight, according to researchers at MIT. The optical illusion of motion aftereffect, the phenomenon of nearby stationary objects appearing to be moving after watching a continuously flowing object like a waterfall or the note interface of Guitar Hero, could be more than just a trick of the eyes. Experiments elsewhere have shown that blind subjects reading Braille triggered activity in the visual cortex of the brain. This was long held to be the brain’s compensation mechanism, but the MIT experiments may prove otherwise.
True to form at MIT, the researchers turned to a device known as DaVinci, an apple-sized tactile simulator with 64 different pins that can be controlled separately or in conjunction. As subjects watched dark stripes rise and fall on a white screen, DaVinci tapped out a stationary stripe along the subjects’ fingertips. Another test featured the opposite stimuli; DaVinci swept up and down the subject’s fingertips, while the stripes on the screen stayed stationary.
The surprising result was that the motion aftereffect was transferred between the senses. Subjects reported that they felt DaVinci moving when in fact it was tapping out a stationary stripe while watching moving stripes, and that it was moving in the opposite direction as the stripes. They also perceived that the onscreen stripe was moving in the opposite direction as DaVinci’s sweep.
This shows that the senses and the brain’s mechanisms for interpreting them are even more complex than we realize. This discovery could lead to new treatment regimens for stroke victims or other brain injuries that impair vision or touch.
Article: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/409/1
Pictures and videos of DaVinci: http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~haptic/laterotactile/dev/stress/
Moving stripe example: http://web.mit.edu/~tkonkle/www/CrossmodalMAE.html
Actually, there may be a link between the senses of touch and sight, according to researchers at MIT. The optical illusion of motion aftereffect, the phenomenon of nearby stationary objects appearing to be moving after watching a continuously flowing object like a waterfall or the note interface of Guitar Hero, could be more than just a trick of the eyes. Experiments elsewhere have shown that blind subjects reading Braille triggered activity in the visual cortex of the brain. This was long held to be the brain’s compensation mechanism, but the MIT experiments may prove otherwise.
True to form at MIT, the researchers turned to a device known as DaVinci, an apple-sized tactile simulator with 64 different pins that can be controlled separately or in conjunction. As subjects watched dark stripes rise and fall on a white screen, DaVinci tapped out a stationary stripe along the subjects’ fingertips. Another test featured the opposite stimuli; DaVinci swept up and down the subject’s fingertips, while the stripes on the screen stayed stationary.
The surprising result was that the motion aftereffect was transferred between the senses. Subjects reported that they felt DaVinci moving when in fact it was tapping out a stationary stripe while watching moving stripes, and that it was moving in the opposite direction as the stripes. They also perceived that the onscreen stripe was moving in the opposite direction as DaVinci’s sweep.
This shows that the senses and the brain’s mechanisms for interpreting them are even more complex than we realize. This discovery could lead to new treatment regimens for stroke victims or other brain injuries that impair vision or touch.
Article: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/409/1
Pictures and videos of DaVinci: http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~haptic/laterotactile/dev/stress/
Moving stripe example: http://web.mit.edu/~tkonkle/www/CrossmodalMAE.html
posted by Jeremy Rogers at 3:21 PM
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