Welcome to the Active Touch Lab!

The Active Touch Laboratory uses psychophysics, computational modelling, skin imaging, and robotics to investigate tactile sensing in people and intelligent machines.

We are based at the University of Sheffield in the School of Psychology. We are also affiliated with Sheffield Robotics, INSIGNEO Institute for in silico Medicine, and the Neuroscience Institute.

Our research has been funded by the European Union, the Leverhulme Trust, the Medical Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Skin mechanics and neural coding

How do the mechanical properties of the skin affect neural coding? Our research aims to uncover how mechanical contact events propagate through the skin, both on a coarse and a small scale, and then drive individual mechanoreceptor responses.

Example publications:

• Sub-surface deformation of individual fingerprint ridges during tactile interactions
• Fingertip viscoelasticity enables human tactile neurons to encode loading history alongside current force

Modelling tactile population responses

We build large-scale models that simulate population responses from thousands of mechanoreceptive afferents innervating the hand or the foot. These models can help investigate neural coding on the population level and are employed in neuroprosthetic and robotics applications.

Example publications:

• Modelling foot sole cutaneous afferents: FootSim
• Population coding strategies in human tactile afferents

Tactile perception

Using careful psychophysical testing, we explore how we perceive both external objects and our own body through the sense of touch.

Example publications:

• Can we tell where our bodies end and the external world begins? Evidence for precise three-dimensional internal body models
• Texture perception at the foot sole: Comparison between walking, sitting, and to the hand

Cortical coding and plasticity

Using computational models ranging from the abstract to the detailed, we explore how touch is represented in the brain. We also investigate how these representations can adapt over time and how they might shape perception.

Example publications:

• Expansion and contraction of resource allocation in sensory bottlenecks
• Malleability of the cortical hand map following a finger nerve block