Thermo-Tactile Interactions: Some Influences of Temperature on Touch

Abstract

Although psychophysical interactions and confusions among the dermal sense-modalities and their adequate stimuli have cropped up from time to time over the last century, they have tended, in my opinion, to receive less attention and follow-up research than they deserve. Sometimes the various modalities appear to behave with remarkable independence from one another, as for example when the skin is mapped for punctiform sensibility by needles, horse-hairs, and tiny thermal contactors. These hardly mimic the stimuli of everyday life, however, nor has the physiological meaning of the dermal “spot” maps ever come under agreement by students of the senses. In any case, since the time of von Frey the study of a given dermal sense has tended to proceed as if the others never existed, and stimulation has often tended to be unrealistically microscopic and monodimensional.