Attention in sense of touch

Abstract

In everyday life the human brain is confronted with an enormous amount of sensory input at any given moment. To guarantee coherent and adaptive behaviour, selective attention is needed to focus the limited processing resources on the relevant part of the available information while ignoring the rest [1, 2]. This chapter provides an overview on some topics of current research in attention and the sense of touch. We will mainly focus on studies using mechanical stimuli rather than electrical stimulation. The physical characteristics of electrical stimuli (sharp and short duration of only a fraction of a millisecond) makes them closer to pain stimuli and, thus, suboptimal to mimic the complex interactions between different mechanoreceptors of the glabrous skin [3–5]. In contrast, mechanical stimuli have not such a sharp onset (mostly they are delivered in form of a sinusoid, see below) and make contact with the skin for much longer.