short-term visual deprivation does not enhance passive tactile spatial acuity短期视觉剥夺不能提高被动触觉空间敏锐度.pdfVIP

Short-Term Visual Deprivation Does Not Enhance Passive Tactile Spatial Acuity 1 2 3 1,2,3 Michael Wong , Erik Hackeman , Caitlin Hurd , Daniel Goldreich * 1 McMaster Integrative Neuroscience Discovery and Study, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2 Department of Occupational Therapy, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 3 Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Abstract An important unresolved question in sensory neuroscience is whether, and if so with what time course, tactile perception is enhanced by visual deprivation. In three experiments involving 158 normally sighted human participants, we assessed whether tactile spatial acuity improves with short-term visual deprivation over periods ranging from under 10 to over 110 minutes. We used an automated, precisely controlled two-interval forced-choice grating orientation task to assess each participant’s ability to discern the orientation of square-wave gratings pressed against the stationary index finger pad of the dominant hand. A two-down one-up staircase (Experiment 1) or a Bayesian adaptive procedure (Experiments 2 and 3) was used to determine the groove width of the grating whose orientation each participant could reliably discriminate. The experiments consistently showed that tactile grating orientation discrimination does not improve with short-term visual deprivation. In fact, we found that tactile performance degraded slightly but significantly upon a brief period of visual deprivation (Experiment 1) and did not improve over periods of up to 110 minutes of deprivation (Experiments 2 and 3).