Our choices are often informed by temporally integrating streams of sensory information. This has been well demonstrated in the visual and auditory domains, but the integration of tactile information over time has been less studied. We designed an active touch task in which subjects explored a spheroid-shaped object to determine its inclination with respect to the horizontal plane (inclined to the left or the right). In agreement with previous findings, our results show that more errors, and longer decision times, accompany difficult decisions (small inclination angles). To gain insight into the decision-making process, we used a task in which the experimenter manipulated the time available for tactile exploration on a trial-by-trial basis. The behavioral results were fit with a bounded accumulation model and an independent sampling model that assumes no sensory accumulation. The results of model fits favor an accumulation-to-bound mechanism and suggest that participants integrate the first 600 ms of 1800 ms-long stimuli. This means that the somatosensory system benefits from longer streams of information, although it does not make use of all available evidence.

我们的选择通常是通过暂时整合感官信息流来告知的。这已经在视觉和听觉领域得到了很好的证明，但是随着时间的流逝，触觉信息的整合研究还很少。我们设计了一个主动触摸任务，其中，受试者探索了一个球形物体，以确定其相对于水平面的倾斜度（向左或向右倾斜）。与以前的发现一致，我们的结果表明，更多的错误和更长的决策时间伴随着困难的决策（较小的倾斜角度）。为了深入了解决策过程，我们使用了一项任务，在该任务中，实验人员在逐个试验的基础上操纵可用于触觉探索的时间。行为结果与有界积累模型和假设没有感官积累的独立采样模型。模型拟合的结果有利于累积到绑定机制，并建议参与者整合1800毫秒长的刺激的前600毫秒。这意味着尽管没有利用所有可用的证据，但体感系统受益于更长的信息流。