Novel Study on Self-Tickling Using Robotics and Haptics Technologies

Abstract

People have strong tickling sensation when someone touches sensitive body-parts (e.g., neck, ribs) although such strong tickling sensation is attenuated when they do the same stimulation by themselves. In general, the sense of agency, which is the sense that we are generating or managing actions of our body, is considered to be a key factor of producing these different sensations (even if the same stimulation is presented), but we also assume that the accordance of haptic cues exchanged between the touching body-part and touched body-part plays an important role in self-tickling, which would be helpful to further understand the underlying mechanism of self-tickling. The present paper designs and develops a novel experimental system which can manipulate force feedback in self-tickling and examines the applicability to the cognitive neuroscience study.