Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, 3710 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
Department of Neurology, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 22;13(1):3082. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-30067-3.
Magnified vision of one's body part has been shown to improve tactile discrimination. We used an anesthetic cream (AC) to determine if somesthetic stimulation that alters the perception of the size of one's body would also improve two point-discrimination (2PD). In Experiment 1, application of AC caused an increase in perceived lip size and an improvement in a 2PD. As perceived lip size increased, subjects became more accurate in identifying that they had been touched in two locations. Experiment 2 confirmed this effect in a larger sample and introduced a control condition (no AC) that demonstrated that the change in performance was not attributable to practice or familiarity with the task. In Experiment 3, we showed that both AC and moisturizing cream improved subjects' ability to indicate that they had been touched in 2 locations, but the improvement was modulated by perceived lip size only for AC. These results support the idea that changes in the body representation influence 2PD.
放大身体部位的视觉已被证明可以提高触觉辨别能力。我们使用一种麻醉乳膏（AC）来确定是否会改变对身体大小的感知的体感刺激也会改善两点辨别（2PD）。在实验 1 中，AC 的应用导致感知到的嘴唇大小增加，并且 2PD 得到改善。随着感知到的嘴唇大小的增加，受试者在识别出他们在两个位置被触摸时变得更加准确。实验 2 在更大的样本中证实了这一效果，并引入了一个对照条件（无 AC），表明性能的变化不是由于练习或对任务的熟悉程度所致。在实验 3 中，我们表明 AC 和保湿霜都可以提高受试者指出他们在两个位置被触摸的能力，但只有 AC 会根据感知到的嘴唇大小来调节这种改善。这些结果支持这样一种观点，即身体代表的变化会影响 2PD。
