In haptic perception, information is often sampled serially (e.g., a stimulus is repeatedly indented to estimate its softness), requiring that sensory information is retained and integrated over time. Hence, integration of sequential information is likely affected by memory. Particularly, when two sequentially explored stimuli are compared, integration of information on the second stimulus might be determined by the fading representation of the first stimulus. We investigated how the exploration length of the first stimulus and a temporal delay affect contributions of sequentially gathered estimates of the second stimulus in haptic softness discrimination. Participants subsequently explored two silicon rubber stimuli by indenting the first stimulus one or five times and the second stimulus always three times. In an additional experiment, we introduced a 5-s delay after the first stimulus was indented five times. We show that the longer the first stimulus is explored, the more estimates of the second stimulus’ softness contribute to the discrimination of the two stimuli, independent of the delay. This suggests that the exploration length of the first stimulus influences the strength of its representation, persisting at least for 5 s, and determines how much information about the second stimulus is exploited for the comparison.

中文翻译：

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刺激探索长度和时间对触觉柔软度识别中信息整合的影响

在触觉感知中，信息通常是连续采样的（例如，刺激被反复缩进以估计其柔软度），需要随着时间的推移保留和整合感官信息。因此，顺序信息的整合很可能受到记忆的影响。特别是，当比较两个顺序探索的刺激时，关于第二个刺激的信息的整合可能由第一个刺激的衰落表示决定。我们调查了第一个刺激的探索长度和时间延迟如何影响按顺序收集的第二个刺激的估计在触觉柔软度辨别中的贡献。参与者随后通过将第一个刺激缩进一到五次和第二个刺激始终缩进 3 次来探索两种硅橡胶刺激。在另一个实验中，在第一个刺激缩进五次后，我们引入了 5 秒的延迟。我们表明，探索第一个刺激的时间越长，对第二个刺激的柔软度的估计就越多，这与延迟无关。这表明第一个刺激的探索长度影响其表征的强度，至少持续 5 秒，并决定了有多少关于第二个刺激的信息被用于比较。