Research project Touch: From fingertip to brain

The sense of touch is an interdisciplinary challenge requiring integrated efforts from material science, tribology, physics, neuroscience and psychology and thus requires physical, human, and in silico measurements. It is vital for the retention of tactile acuity throughout our lifetime, essential for the future of materials and product design, and the human responses they engender, and necessary for creating future haptic components in virtual reality.

Predictive capacity from models will be used to design and produce systematically varying surface sets, to vary the physical inputs to the somatosensory system, arising from contact with the skin. Brain scanning will be performed on individuals while they complete tactile tasks, to illuminate the neural networks and cognitive pathways they employ. This information will be integrated with psychophysical experiments to provide a mechanistic understanding of the output – the final perceptual experience.

Variation between individuals will be emphasised, for example in the physical and cognitive aspects of age-related sensory decline and its amelioration.