Cognitive and Tactile Factors Affecting Human Haptic Performance in Later Life

摘要: Background Vision and haptics are the key modalities by which humans perceive objects interact with their environment in a target-oriented manner. Both share higher-order neural resources mechanisms required for object exploration. Compared to vision, understanding of haptic information processing is still rudimentary. Although it known that performance, similar many other skills, decreases old age, underlying not clear. It yet be determined what extent this decrease related age-related loss tactile acuity or cognitive capacity. Methodology/Principal Findings We investigated performance 81 older adults means cross-modal recognition test. Additionally, we assessed subjects' an apparatus-based two-point discrimination paradigm, non-verbal Raven-Standard-Progressive matrices As expected, there was significant decline on all 3 tests. With exception acuity, found more distinct female subjects. Correlation analyses revealed strong relationship between Tactile contrary, only significantly correlated male performance. Conclusions Haptic demanding task especially when comes exploration complex, unfamiliar objects. Our data support disproportionately higher impact cognition as compared acuity. findings agreement studies reporting increase co-variation individual sensory general functioning age.