Movement-Related Tactile Gating in Blindness

In this work we measured the velocity discrimination threshold of blind and sighted individuals using dynamic stimuli discrimination. Participants had to perceive a sequence of two movements, provided by a wheel, with different speeds and discriminate the faster one. Our experimental conditions were (1) passive touch, in which participants had their finger still while the wheel rotated, and (2) active touch, in which participants move their finger in the opposite direction of the movement of the wheel.

The just noticeable difference (JND) and point of subject equality (PSE) are reported for each condition (Passive /Active) of each subject.

Subject is the code of each participant, the B that appears at the end of some subject's code indicate that is a blind participant. Age is the age of each participant, condition is if the tactile input was passive or active, sensory_stimulus is always touch, standard_cm_sec is the standard velocity of the wheel (3cm/sec in our case), pse_cm_sec is the value of the point of subject equality (PSE) obtained by the participant, jnd_cm_sec is the value of our dependent variable just noticeable difference (JND) of each participant, vision is if the subject was blind (B) or sighted (S), blind_duration correspond to the number of years of blindness of our blind sample, type_blindness is if the participant is considered late blind (LB), early blind (EB) or a sighted control (SC).