Johnson Ruth M, Burton Philip C, Ro Tony
Rice University, Psychology Department, MS 25, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Brain Res. 2006 Feb 16;1073-1074:398-406. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2005.12.025. Epub 2006 Feb 7.
Recent studies have reported that vision can enhance tactile perception, even in patients with somatosensory deficits. However, it is unclear in these previous studies whether visual input truly enhances detection of tactile stimuli or induces a higher propensity for reporting touch by changing response criteria. In this study, we demonstrate in neurologically normal subjects that in addition to small increases in tactile sensitivity when a non-informative, suprathreshold visual stimulus is presented, there are highly consistent changes in response criteria for reporting touch with vision, even when no tactile stimulus is delivered. These results suggest that some of the previously reported enhancements of touch from vision may rather be a consequence of strategic sensory encoding processes that rely upon the typical correlations between multisensory events.
最近的研究报告称，即使在本体感觉有缺陷的患者中，视觉也可以增强触觉感知。然而，在这些先前的研究中，尚不清楚视觉输入是真的增强了对触觉刺激的检测，还是通过改变反应标准而导致报告触摸的倾向更高。在本研究中，我们在神经功能正常的受试者中证明，除了在呈现非信息性的阈上视觉刺激时触觉敏感性略有增加外，即使没有触觉刺激，报告视觉触摸的反应标准也会有高度一致的变化。这些结果表明，先前报道的一些视觉对触摸的增强作用，可能更多是依赖于多感官事件之间典型相关性的策略性感觉编码过程的结果。
