Skin and Touch

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Abstract

The skin contains a wide variety of receptors that give rise to our experience of touch. Tactile experience depends on attention, and is typically the result of multisensory integration. Many of our tactile experiences are the result of the integration of inputs from different classes of receptors – known as touch blends. The sense of touch is an important albeit understudied sense. While the bandwidth of the sense of touch is relatively low, stimulating the skin can nevertheless convey emotional benefits.

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Charles Spence received his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1995. He is a university professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. Prof Spence heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. He has published over 550 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last decade. He has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He is currently Associate Editor for Multisensory Perception.

Alberto Gallace received his PhD in cognitive neurosciences from University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy, in 2005. After the completion of his PhD, he worked for 2 years in the Department of Experimental Psychology of Oxford University on crossmodal integration. While working in Oxford he also obtained a Junior Research Fellowship from Wolfson College. He is a university researcher at the department of psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, where he teaches psychobiology of human behavior. He authored 2 books, over 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals (including general science journals, such as PNAS and leading journals in his field, such as Psychological Bulletin, Brain, Pain, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Neurology), and over 10 book chapters.

Andrew J. Bremner received his DPhil in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford in 2003. He is director of the Sensorimotor Development Research Unit and Reader in Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths University of London. Dr Bremner is currently leading a 5-year European Research Council–funded project 'Human Embodied Multisensory Development,' and was awarded the 2013 Margaret Donaldson Early Career Prize for an outstanding contribution to developmental psychology (British Psychological Society). He is currently Associate Editor for the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, and Academic Editor for PLoS ONE.

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