Tactile Processing

Tactile information processing is of vital importance for differentiating and protecting our body from the external world. At the same time, it provides a powerful means of physical and social interaction with other individuals. Not surprisingly, then, tactile processing develops and reaches full functionality well before other sensory modalities. Despite the fact that the neurocognitive mechanisms of tactile information processing are understudied with respect to the processing occurring in other senses, researchers have just started to unveil their complexity. In particular, it has been shown that in order to process touch, our brain requires the integration of information coming from different classes of tactile sensory-specific receptors, with information arising from the processing of other sensory stimuli (e.g., visual or auditory). Cognitive factors, attention, beliefs, and the physiological parameters of the organisms also enter the computation that leads to tactile perception. Even more interestingly, research has shown that tactile processing is very effective in driving our behavior in a number of different contexts. This powerful effects of touch are, at least in part, due to the role played by newly discovered tactile fibers that would seem to be related to the most pleasant aspects of our social behavior.