Responses of cutaneous mechanoreceptors within fingerpad to stimulus information for tactile softness sensation of materials

Softness sensation is one of primitive tactile textures. While the psychophysical characteristics of softness sensation have been thoroughly studied, it is lack of a deep understanding of the underlying neuromechanical principles. On the stimulus–response processes of human fingerpad touching fabrics and the physiological properties of slowly adapting type I (SAIs) cutaneous mechanoreceptors within fingerpad, a fabric-skin-receptor coupling model was built and validated. By the fabric-skin-receptor model a series of numerical experiments was conducted, and how the evoked neural responses of cutaneous mechanoreceptors change with the composite compliance of both fingerpad skin and the materials in contact was investigated. The results indicated that the evoked neural responses of populations of cutaneous mechanoreceptors by the physical stimulus from fabrics were nearly proportional to the perceived softness magnitude, and nonlinearly increased and then decreased with the effective elastic modulus of fabrics or the relative elastic modulus of fabrics to soft tissues within fingerpad, where the nonlinear inflection point depended on the touching force level. Therefore, it concluded that the tactile judgment of the physical information for softness sensation of objects was an encoding of neural responses of populations of SAIs cutaneous mechanoreceptors, and the physical information depended on the mechanical interaction of fingerpad and objects in contact.