Keeping in touch with what we see : how vision influences tactile spatial perception?
(2025)
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- Abstract
- Perception of a tactile stimulus occurs on one’s body and with respect to the external space. Owing to the multisensory nature of the external environment, spatial perception of touch is influenced by the spatially dominant visual modality. In this thesis, we investigated how does the visual modality affects the perception of touch on our body and localization in the external space. To address this, we performed three different studies encompassing psychophysical and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques. In the first study, we investigated how visual experience affects the tactile distance perception underlying body shape representations by comparing the anisotropy of tactile distance perception in sighted and early blind individuals. In the second study, we investigated the spatial representations of tactile motion signals across different hand postures to determine the frame of references used to encode tactile motion directions in different regions of the brain. We also examined where do the visual and tactile motion signals align in the brain? Finally, in the third study, we developed an experimental set up to deliver reliable directional motion cues across hand postures which could be useful to investigate multisensory motion interactions in real-world scenarios. This thesis sheds light on the neural mechanism underlying the spatial representations of touch in the human brain
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Iqra Shahzad. (2025). Keeping in touch with what we see : how vision influences tactile spatial perception? https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/246512