Visual recovery of touch

Andrea Serino, Dipartimento di Psicologia & Centro studi e ricerche in Neuroscienze Cognitive, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract
Viewing the body is reported to improve tactile acuity (Kennett et al., 2001). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether this effect is dependent on the somatotopic congruency between the seen and touched body parts and whether it occurs only in subjects presenting low tactile sensitivity.
Therefore, 33 normal subjects performed a two point discrimination task (2PDT) in three conditions: looking at their stimulated forearm (ARM condition), at a rubber foot (FOOT condition) or at a neutral object (NEUTRAL condition). The results showed that 2PDT accuracy was higher in the ARM condition, but only in subjects with lower tactile spatial sensitivity.
Thus, it was hypothesized that the visual modality could improve tactile spatial sensitivity in subjects with tactile deficits. To test this hypothesis the same experiment was conducted on 10 brain damaged patients suffering a reduced somatosensory sensitivity. Again an amelioration of the performance was found in ARM condition.
In conclusion, tactile sensitivity can be ameliorated in brain damaged patients by the sight of the stimulated body part, thus suggesting that the interaction between different sensory modalities might be effective in recovering deficits in single modalities.

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