Exploring the Touch-Brain Mechanism while Using Neurotactile Stimulation in Human
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Presented by Swati Banerjee
The brain, being the most complex part of the human body, is fundamental for the process of existence; it is responsible for defining individualities and is the creator of the properties that define humans. One of the main properties of human beings is the integration and perception of various senses necessary for interacting with the environment.
Research focused on answering these questions have found a niche in neuroimaging and neurosciences studies where Electroencephalogram (EEG) emerges as an efficient tool for non-invasive measurements of brain rhythms. These approaches have historically employed visual stimuli and have explored the visual neural pathway. However other modalities of senses, like auditory and even more haptic stimuli has shown to be a challenge in itself when put together, as the decoding of the neural correlates are quite complex to understand in case of two or more sensory pathways. In real life scenario human has to deal with multiple stimuli together and with the advancement of the technology one needs efficient control of the same.
This prompts for the better understand the underlying brain activity in case of involvement of multiple senses. Most of the experiments so far uses only audio-visual cues and the addition of haptics makes it even more interesting to experiment and is a challenge. This multimodality is what we plan to discover with this work and is what makes this technique novel. In this work, our focus is on understanding the integration of information in three neural pathways in the brain while applying Haptics-Audio-Visual (HAV) cues. The novelty arises in two folds: 1. A neuro-physiologically rich EEG database using this new HAV acquisition protocol. 2. Novel and efficient scientific framework transferable to upcoming synthetic technologies simulating real life scenarios.