Discriminative feature integration by individuals

Abstract

A tactile pattern on the skin generally comes to be recognised from its function within action. What is perceived tactually and may generate a textural or geometrical sensation is therefore a set of dynamic characteristics that can be extracted by mechanoreceptors and central neural processing from the physics of the interactions of hands, mouth or other parts of the body with common objects and materials. The recognised dynamic (as is true of any sensory modality) may be diagnosable as distinct features that are integrated by the whole system's operation. If so, this transmission of feature information over a channel or in a dimension can be measured as the strength of the influence of that aspect of the stimulating pattern on the observed output, in units of the acuity of response differences for deviations of the pattern from its familiar configuration of features. When applied at the individual level, such multidimensional discrimination analysis provides powerful diagnoses of pattern-recognition processes.