Tactile Stickiness Perception

"The bandage keeps coming off my arm, but it definitely sticks to my fingertip." Some people might have a similar experience. From this phenomenon, we can bring up several interesting questions. Why does the stickiness vary from location to location on the skin? What information is computed from the sticky surface elements and how? What is the relationship between physical and perceptual stickiness? Unfortunately, at the moment, little information is mounted to answer these questions. Previous studies revealed that the tactile sense of stickiness is aroused when the skin is stretched as people detach their body from an adhesive substance. Several researchers further suggest that the slowly adapting type 2 (SA2) mechanoreceptors with the Ruffini corpuscle end-organ, known to be sensitive to skin stretch, play an important role in the stickiness information process. Despite these significant findings, the details of stickiness perception and its neural mechanisms remained unclear.

The scope of this Research Topic is to improve our current understanding of tactile stickiness perception, in an effort to help the field move forward. We aim to receive a various range of studies in the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience related to the perception of sticky substances. Furthermore, we aim to investigate perceptual and neural responses to sticky stimuli for unimodal and multisensory conditions. This Research Topic emphasizes human studies on tactile stickiness perception, but studies on animal models are also welcomed.

This goal of this interdisciplinary collection of articles is to integrate researches from diverse domains. Potential subtopics include, but are not limited to:

- Stickiness and its measurements
- Multisensory stickiness perception
- Active and passive touches on sticky materials
- Stickiness perception and fine motor skills
- Neural correlates of stickiness perception
- Emotional responses to sticky stimulations