Difference Threshold

Effect of Tactile Sensitivity on Two Point Threshold

The skin covers and surrounds the entire human body, making it the largest sensory organ we have. On the skin there are millions of receptors that pick up many different sensations such as touch, pressure, pain and temperature. These receptors are sometimes focused to pick up only one sensation while others can pick up a multitude of sensations at once. These stimuli then get sent to our somatosensory cortex where our brain can process how the skin was touched (Nevid, 2015). However there are some cases in which one receptor’s signal gets overwhelmed by another receptors signal. This means that your brain cannot determine difference threshold between the two receptors. The difference threshold

However, in our experiment we will testing both the forearm and calf of the participant to compare the threshold of the two. Our participant will be tested on their ability to sense one or two points on forearm or calf that are being touched by the esthesiometer. The data collected will help us determine the difference threshold (DT) for each body part and see if there is a significant difference between each area of the body. Due to all of the information and studies I have looked at I hypothesize that there will be a significant difference between the DT of the forearm compared to the calf of our

Certain things like habitation or expectation could have occurred while performing the trails. Habituation is when the participant becomes aware of stimuli and reports after the threshold. Expectation is similar in that the subject expects the stimuli, and then makes a premature judgment based on it. These things could have occurred during the trails while the participant was waiting for the points to be detected. This is why there only 10 trails per body part. More trail could have been performed to try to get more accurate data, but after sometime habitation or expectation would have occurred and the data would be affected by it. Another issue the accuracy of the measurements. It’s important to start each trail on the same point, however we did not indicate the exact starting point. This most likely didn’t cause that much of an issue, but it’s always something that can hinder the measurements accuracy. Next time it would be better to make a mark of a starting point on each of the body parts