Integration of somatosensory submodalities for object manipulation.

Philippe LEFEVRE, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgique

When: March 10rd – 11 am – 12 am

Where: Espace Pouillon

Summary: The somatosensory system plays a key role in our ability to acquire information about the surrounding environment. In contrast with other sensory systems like vision or audition that are associated with a clearly identified sensory organ, the eyes or ears, somatosensation arises from the entire body and encompasses various submodalities including tactile, thermal, and proprioceptive inputs. While cross-modal integration and interactions have been studied extensively across sensory modalities such as vision and audition, very few studies have investigated integration across the different submodalities of the somatosensory system. One reason is that it is much more complex to control independently the stimulation of different somatosensory modalities, as compared to vision and audition for instance, for which presenting combined and controlled stimuli is relatively straightforward using a display and loudspeaker. In my talk, I will present recent work that aims at uncovering how somatosensory submodalities integrate during tactile exploration and haptic manipulation to generate coherent percepts and inform us about the external world. I will then evaluate how motor control integrates these multimodal inputs in the context of object manipulation. The output of this research will enable a better understanding of the sense of touch in an ecological context. It will have implications for the design of haptic interfaces and virtual reality setups that provide haptic feedback.