Active and passive processing of sequential tactile inputs

Abstract

In this thesis, a psychophysics experiment, which is designed to test the effect of active and passive touch on tactile temporal processing, is presented. Active and passive touch are terms that were defined first by J.J. Gibson, and there have been many experiments done where these two were compared. Most of these studies made the comparison in the dimension of tactile spatial processing. In this study however, the subject is asked to detect the tactile stimuli applied at certain time intervals. Therefore, tactile temporal processing was tested here. The tactile stimuli were applied both actively and passively, and the correct judgments of the subjects were recorded at both conditions. Besides active/passive touch, the effects of visual attention and scan velocity on tactile temporal processing were tested in this study.|Keywords: Active touch, passive touch, temporal processing, cognitive processes