Perceived Frequency of Aperiodic Vibrotactile Stimuli Depends on Temporal EncodingShow others and affiliations
2018 (English)In: HAPTICS: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND APPLICATIONS, PT I, SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG , 2018, Vol. 10893, p. 199-208Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Mechanical transients and events arising during dexterous manipulation are detected by tactile afferents. Naturally occurring vibrotactile stimuli have a mix of frequencies, which creates complex afferent discharge patterns. Psychophysical correlates of these complex discharge patterns could be useful tools to gain greater insights into tactile coding and the principles of signal processing in the nervous system. In a previous study, we discovered that frequency perception of periodic bursting stimuli depended on the duration of the silent gap between spike bursts. Here, we investigated the perceived frequency of aperiodic vibrotactile stimuli. We found that perceived frequency was lower than the mean discharge rate of the afferents. This supports a hypothesis stemming from our previous work, that within spike trains consisting of mixed length inter-spike intervals, the contribution of a given interval to perceived frequency is weighted by its length. Thus, the present study reveals that frequency perception of both periodic and aperiodic stimuli is encoded by sophisticated processing of individual inter-spike intervals, rather than based on detection of periodicity or spike counting.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG , 2018. Vol. 10893, p. 199-208
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ISSN 0302-9743
Keywords [en]
Tactile; Vibration; Frequency; Aperiodic; Psychophysics
National Category
Signal Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-154761DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-93445-7_18ISI: 000458559900018ISBN: 978-3-319-93445-7 (print)ISBN: 978-3-319-93444-0 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-154761DiVA, id: diva2:1291735
Conference
11th International Conference on Haptics - Science, Technology, and Applications (EuroHaptics)
Note
Funding Agencies|NHMRC Project Grant [APP1028284]; Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship
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