Haptic memory

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Haptic memory is the form of sensory memory specific to touch stimuli. Haptic memory is used regularly when assessing the necessary forces for gripping and interacting with familiar objects. [1] It may also influence one's interactions with novel objects of an apparently similar size and density. Similar to visual iconic memory, traces of haptically acquired information are short lived and prone to decay after approximately two seconds. [2] Haptic memory is best for stimuli applied to areas of the skin that are more sensitive to touch. [3] Haptics involves at least two subsystems; cutaneous, or everything skin related, and kinesthetic, or joint angle and the relative location of body. Haptics generally involves active, manual examination and is quite capable of processing physical traits of objects and surfaces. [4]

Contents

Overview

Perhaps the first experiment conducted to study the phenomenon of haptic memory was that of Bliss, Crane, Mansfield, and Townsend [5] who investigated the characteristics of immediate recall for brief tactile stimuli applied to the hand. The results obtained showed a haptic memory store remarkably similar to the visual memory store suggested by Sperling in 1960, with a capacity of approximately four to five items. Similar to tests of visual sensory memory, it was also found that haptic memory performance was significantly improved with the use of partial report procedures. This particular finding is consistent with more recent research by Gallace in 2008. Bliss et al. interpreted this difference in partial report versus whole report as a sensory form of memory for passively presented tactile stimuli with a high capacity and short duration. Additional support for the short duration of haptic memory comes from studies by Gilson and Baddeley in 1969. According to these studies, memory for stimuli applied to the skin is resilient for approximately ten seconds after removal of the stimulus, even when the individual is engaged in tasks that inhibit verbal rehearsal. After this delay, the memory trace becomes vulnerable to forgetting as it decays from the haptic memory store and begins to rely on a more central memory store. [6] Similar findings were later reported by Miles and Borthwick in 1996, who emphasized the role of tactile interference on discriminability of the target location and the role of central processing resources in consolidation of haptic memory. [7] More recent experimental procedures and technologies such as minielectrode recording devices and transcranial magnetic stimulation have allowed for mapping of brain areas involved in the storage of tactile memories. [8] [9] Implicated in most of these studies is the primary somatosensory cortex. More recent studies have also investigated a broader selection of participants, allowing for the discovery of an intact haptic memory in infants. [10] [11] [12]

Neuroanatomy

Tactile memories are organized somatotopically, following the organization of the somatosensory cortex. This means that areas close on the body surface receive nervous signals from areas that are close together on the brain surface. [13] Several distinct areas of the parietal lobe are responsible for contributing to different aspects of haptic memory. Memory for the properties of stimuli such as roughness, spatial density, and texture involves activation of the parietal operculum. Properties of stimuli such as size and shape, as detected by touch receptors in the skin, are stored in the anterior part of the parietal lobe. Memory for spatial information such as the location of stimuli involves the right superior parietal lobule and temporoparietal junction. [14] Additional neuroimaging data has been provided by studies using microelectrodes implanted in the somatosensory cortex of monkeys. When performing a delayed match to sample task with objects of identical dimensions but different surface features, activity is observed in somatosensory neurons during perception and in the short-term memory for tactile stimuli. [8]

According to a study done by Bruce V. DiMattia, Keith A. Posley and Joaquin M. Fuster, it was found that monkeys were quite capable of concurrent Visual-to-Haptic as well as Haptic-to-Visual crossmodal matching of objects by size, shape and texture. It was also discovered that they were more adept at performing cross modal matching in the Visual-to-Haptic direction. [15]

Development

Memory is important in infancy as it forms the basis for more complex procedures such as learning and reasoning. Studies of haptic memory in infants is particularly useful because it allows researchers to study the more perceptual representation of information as opposed to verbal or semantic aspects. Haptic abilities develop in stages in infants: [10] The last two decades have allowed researchers to study the sensory system of infants which gives an insight to the initial stages of thinking, deciding and reasoning in a human brain.

  1. Newborn: Haptic ability develops in the mouth, as it is essential for feeding.
  2. 1 month of age: Recognition of texture and shape
  3. 2 months of age: Recognition of familiar objects after 30 second delay
  4. 4 months of age: Recognize familiar objects after 2 minute delay

Evidence of haptic memory was discovered in infants as young as two months by Myriam Lhote and Arlette Streti, [11] who demonstrated that haptic habituation occurs asymmetrically between the hands of infants, and that differences in haptic memory exist between sexes. For instance, in 2-month-old infants, haptic habituation was found in both the right and the left hand. Babies were able to encode haptically some characteristics or features of objects without visual control with their left hand as well as with their right hand. In the experiment, haptic habituation was formed through an occurred stimuli and at the end, it has seen that even though stimuli was not present, infants still carry on their stimuli habit. [11] It was also shown that infantile haptic memory is robust in that it is somewhat resistant to delays (especially in males). These findings support earlier results by Catherwood, [12] which stated that 8-month-old infants were able to recognize a familiar shape after a five-minute delay. Studies by Millar on congenitally blind and blindfolded children have revealed the importance of movement and body-centered cues in haptic memory. While these cues are important in all individuals, blind children tend to rely on them heavily. [16]

Furthermore, it is proven that our haptic cues and memory affects our visual experience and the two experiences are linked for us to comprehend our surroundings. [17]

Implicit

Implicit memory can be referred to as the unconscious recollection of previously presented information. This type of memory influences one's actions and behaviors without the individual having any awareness of its availability for explicit recall. [18] Implicit memory has been linked to phenomena such as skill acquisition, priming, and classical conditioning. In some cases, tactile information is also remembered implicitly. Evidence for this comes from patients with damage to the right cerebral hemisphere, who, due to their brain damage, are unable to explicitly report any of the qualities of objects held in their left hand when another object is simultaneously presented in their right hand. Despite this fact, when the patients are asked to compare the characteristics of objects presented to either hand, their judgements are influenced by objects previously held in their right hand. [19] This suggests that the patients have some memory for the properties of objects recently removed from their right hand that they are not consciously aware of, and that this memory is affecting their accuracy on subsequent tasks. Similar evidence has been found in healthy individuals of varying ages, and in patients with Alzheimer's disease. [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parietal lobe</span> Part of the brain responsible for sensory input and some language processing

The parietal lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The parietal lobe is positioned above the temporal lobe and behind the frontal lobe and central sulcus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hemispatial neglect</span> Medical condition

Hemispatial neglect is a neuropsychological condition in which, after damage to one hemisphere of the brain, a deficit in attention and awareness towards the side of space opposite brain damage is observed. It is defined by the inability of a person to process and perceive stimuli towards the contralesional side of the body or environment. Hemispatial neglect is very commonly contralateral to the damaged hemisphere, but instances of ipsilesional neglect have been reported.

Simultanagnosia is a rare neurological disorder characterized by the inability of an individual to perceive more than a single object at a time. This type of visual attention problem is one of three major components of Bálint's syndrome, an uncommon and incompletely understood variety of severe neuropsychological impairments involving space representation. The term "simultanagnosia" was first coined in 1924 by Wolpert to describe a condition where the affected individual could see individual details of a complex scene but failed to grasp the overall meaning of the image.

Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities may be integrated by the nervous system. A coherent representation of objects combining modalities enables animals to have meaningful perceptual experiences. Indeed, multisensory integration is central to adaptive behavior because it allows animals to perceive a world of coherent perceptual entities. Multisensory integration also deals with how different sensory modalities interact with one another and alter each other's processing.

Stereognosis is the ability to perceive and recognize the form of an object in the absence of visual and auditory information, by using tactile information to provide cues from texture, size, spatial properties, and temperature, etc. In humans, this sense, along with tactile spatial acuity, vibration perception, texture discrimination and proprioception, is mediated by the dorsal column-medial lemniscus pathway of the central nervous system. Stereognosis tests determine whether or not the parietal lobe of the brain is intact. Typically, these tests involved having the patient identify common objects placed in their hand without any visual cues. Stereognosis is a higher cerebral associative cortical function.

Sensory substitution is a change of the characteristics of one sensory modality into stimuli of another sensory modality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Secondary somatosensory cortex</span>

The human secondary somatosensory cortex is a region of cortex in the parietal operculum on the ceiling of the lateral sulcus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Change blindness</span> Perceptual phenomenon

Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. For example, observers often fail to notice major differences introduced into an image while it flickers off and on again. People's poor ability to detect changes has been argued to reflect fundamental limitations of human attention. Change blindness has become a highly researched topic and some have argued that it may have important practical implications in areas such as eyewitness testimony and distractions while driving.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Posterior parietal cortex</span>

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Tactile discrimination is the ability to differentiate information through the sense of touch. The somatosensory system is the nervous system pathway that is responsible for this essential survival ability used in adaptation. There are various types of tactile discrimination. One of the most well known and most researched is two-point discrimination, the ability to differentiate between two different tactile stimuli which are relatively close together. Other types of discrimination like graphesthesia and spatial discrimination also exist but are not as extensively researched. Tactile discrimination is something that can be stronger or weaker in different people and two major conditions, chronic pain and blindness, can affect it greatly. Blindness increases tactile discrimination abilities which is extremely helpful for tasks like reading braille. In contrast, chronic pain conditions, like arthritis, decrease a person's tactile discrimination. One other major application of tactile discrimination is in new prosthetics and robotics which attempt to mimic the abilities of the human hand. In this case tactile sensors function similarly to mechanoreceptors in a human hand to differentiate tactile stimuli.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Somatosensory system</span> Nerve system for sensing touch, temperature, body position, and pain

In physiology, the somatosensory system is the network of neural structures in the brain and body that produce the perception of touch, as well as temperature (thermoception), body position (proprioception), and pain. It is a subset of the sensory nervous system, which also represents visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory stimuli.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cross modal plasticity</span> Reorganization of neurons in the brain to integrate the function of two or more sensory systems

Cross modal plasticity is the adaptive reorganization of neurons to integrate the function of two or more sensory systems. Cross modal plasticity is a type of neuroplasticity and often occurs after sensory deprivation due to disease or brain damage. The reorganization of the neural network is greatest following long-term sensory deprivation, such as congenital blindness or pre-lingual deafness. In these instances, cross modal plasticity can strengthen other sensory systems to compensate for the lack of vision or hearing. This strengthening is due to new connections that are formed to brain cortices that no longer receive sensory input.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tactile hallucination</span>

Tactile hallucination is the false perception of tactile sensory input that creates a hallucinatory sensation of physical contact with an imaginary object. It is caused by the faulty integration of the tactile sensory neural signals generated in the spinal cord and the thalamus and sent to the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) and secondary somatosensory cortex (SII). Tactile hallucinations are recurrent symptoms of neurological diseases such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, Ekbom's syndrome and delerium tremens. Patients who experience phantom limb pains also experience a type of tactile hallucination. Tactile hallucinations are also caused by drugs such as cocaine and alcohol.

During every moment of an organism's life, sensory information is being taken in by sensory receptors and processed by the nervous system. Sensory information is stored in sensory memory just long enough to be transferred to short-term memory. Humans have five traditional senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Sensory memory (SM) allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. A common demonstration of SM is a child's ability to write letters and make circles by twirling a sparkler at night. When the sparkler is spun fast enough, it appears to leave a trail which forms a continuous image. This "light trail" is the image that is represented in the visual sensory store known as iconic memory. The other two types of SM that have been most extensively studied are echoic memory, and haptic memory; however, it is reasonable to assume that each physiological sense has a corresponding memory store. Children for example have been shown to remember specific "sweet" tastes during incidental learning trials but the nature of this gustatory store is still unclear. However, sensory memories might be related to a region of the thalamus, which serves as a source of signals encoding past experiences in the neocortex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dyschiria</span> Neurological disorder

Dyschiria, also known as dyschiric syndrome, is a neurological disorder where one-half of an individual's body or space cannot be recognized or respond to sensations. The term dyschiria is rarely used in modern scientific research and literature. Dyschiria has been often referred to as unilateral neglect, visuo-spatial neglect, or hemispatial neglect from the 20th century onwards.

References

  1. ↑ Johansson; Gordon; Wrestling; Cole (1993-06-15). "Memory Representations Underlying Motor Commands Used During Manipulation of Common and Novel Objects". Journal of Neurophysiology. 69 (6): 1789–1796. doi:10.1152/jn.1993.69.6.1789. PMID   8350123.
  2. ↑ Dubrowski, Carnahan, Shih (2009), "Evidence for Haptic Memory", Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, pp. 145–149, doi:10.1109/WHC.2009.4810867, ISBN   978-1-4244-3858-7, S2CID   206866791
  3. ↑ Murray; Ward, Hockley (1975). "Tactile short-term memory in relation to the two-point threshold". The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 27 (2): 303–312. doi:10.1080/14640747508400489. PMID   1188000. S2CID   32170631.
  4. ↑ Lederman, S. J.; Klatzky, R. L. (2009-09-28). "Haptic perception: A tutorial". Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. 71 (7): 1439–1459. doi:10.3758/app.71.7.1439. ISSN   1943-3921. PMID   19801605. S2CID   207717658.
  5. ↑ Bliss; Crane, Manfield, Townsend (1966). "Information available in brief tactile presentations" Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics". Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 1 (4): 271–283. doi: 10.3758/BF03207391 .{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ↑ Gilson; Baddeley (1969). "Tactile short-term memory". Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 21 (2): 180–184. doi:10.1080/14640746908400211. PMID   5787977. S2CID   36638845.
  7. ↑ Miles; Borthwick (1996). "Tactile short-term memory revisited". Memory. 4 (6): 655–668. doi:10.1080/741940995. PMID   8934459.
  8. 1 2 Zhou; Fuster (1996). "Mnemonic neuronal activity in somatosensory cortex". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 93 (19): 10533–10537. Bibcode:1996PNAS...9310533Z. doi: 10.1073/pnas.93.19.10533 . PMC   38421 . PMID   8927629.
  9. ↑ Harris; Miniussi; Harris; Diamond (2002). "Transient Storage of a Tactile Memory Trace in Primary Somatosensory Cortex" (PDF). The Journal of Neuroscience. 22 (19): 8720–8725. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.22-19-08720.2002 . PMC   6757763 . PMID   12351747 . Retrieved 2011-03-08.
  10. 1 2 Streri; Feron (2008). "The development of haptic abilities in very young infants: From perception to cognition". Infant Behavior and Development. 28 (3): 290–304. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2005.05.004.
  11. 1 2 3 Lhote; Streti (1998). "Haptic Memory and Handedness in 2-month-old Infants". Laterality. 3 (2): 173–192. doi:10.1080/713754298. PMID   15513082.
  12. 1 2 Catherwood (1993). "The Robustness of Infant Haptic Memory: Testing Its Capacity to Withstand Delay and Haptic Interference". Child Development. 64 (3): 702–710. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1993.tb02937.x. PMID   8339690.
  13. ↑ Narici; Modena; Opsomer; Pizella; Romani; Torrioli (1991). "Neuromagnetic somatosensory homunculus: A non-invasive approach in humans". Neuroscience Letters. 121 (1–2): 51–54. doi:10.1016/0304-3940(91)90647-c. PMID   2020390. S2CID   40035631.
  14. ↑ Gallace; Spence (2009). "The Cognitive and Neural Correlates of Tactile Memory". Psychological Bulletin. 135 (3): 380–406. doi:10.1037/a0015325. PMID   19379022.
  15. ↑ Bruce V. DiMattia, Keith A. Posley and Joaquin M Fuster: Neuropsychologia: Crossmodal short-term memory of haptic and visual information. (January 1990), 28 (1), pg. 17-33
  16. ↑ Millar (1976). "Spatial representation by blind and sighted children". Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 12 (3): 460–479. doi:10.1016/0022-0965(76)90074-6. PMID   939949.
  17. ↑ Kelly, J.W. & Avraamides, M.N. & Giudice, N. A. (2011) Haptic experiences influence visually acquired memories: Reference frames during multimodal spatial learning. Psychonomic bulletin & Review. 8:1119-1125.
  18. ↑ Schacter (1987). "Implicit Memory: History and Current Status". Journal of Experimental Psychology. 13 (3): 501–518. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.13.3.501. S2CID   3728984.
  19. ↑ Maravita (1997). "Implicit processing of somatosensory stimuli disclosed by a perceptual aftereffect". NeuroReport. 8 (7): 1671–1674. doi:10.1097/00001756-199705060-00022. PMID   9189912. S2CID   34714216.
  20. ↑ Ballesteros; Reales (2004). "Intact haptic priming in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease: evidence for dissociable memory systems". Neuropsychologia. 42 (8): 1063–1070. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.12.008. PMID   15093145. S2CID   40725434.[ dead link ]
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