Visual and Auditory deterministic signals can facilitate tactile sensations

摘要

We report novel tactile-visual and tactile-auditory interactions in humans, demonstrating that a facilitating sound or visual deterministic signal, that is synchronous with an excitatory tactile deterministic signal presented at the lower leg, increases the peripheral representation of this excitatory signal (deterministic resonance). In a series of experiments we applied a local electrical stimulation and measured the electrical (electromyography or EMG) response of the right calf muscle while the local electrical stimulation was maintained at subthreshold levels (not detected). By introducing the visual or auditory representation of the local electrical signal (facilitation signal) to the central system the signal sensation was recovered and the electrical EMG signal increased. We go further by demonstrating that the neural dynamics of this phenomenon can resemble that of stochastic resonance by showing similar peripheral effects when introducing auditory noise instead of the same deterministic signal. In the last experiment, we show that the paired deterministic stimulations exhibit response functions similar to stochastic resonance.