Two Point Discrimination Conclusion

I was fascinated by the in-class demonstration illustrating the concept of two point discrimination and thought it would be quite interesting to try out the experiment with my family. Later that week, I tried to replicate the experiment using a paperclip bent in a “U” shape. I instructed my parents and younger sister that I would lightly touch the two ends of the paperclip on various areas of their body (fingers, palm, arm, back, leg, etc...). For the demonstration to be successful, it was important to make sure that both ends of the paperclip touched the body at basically the same time and with approximately the same amount of pressure. After each touch I would ask whether they felt one or two pressure points. When they claimed to only have felt one pressure point, I would try again, but with a larger separation of the two ends of the paperclip. I just wanted to get an approximation on how far apart the two pressure points needed to be in order for the subject to be able to perceive two separate/distinct pressure points. My findings were consistent with what was discussed in lecture. The two point discrimination task is related to the size and density of …show more content…
For instance, there is a distorted sensory representation in the brain. Outputs from touch receptors in the fingers/ facial areas occupy more space on the somatosensory cortex, so perhaps more brain power is spent interpreting the sensations of touch from the fingers/face compared to the rest of the body. In our conversation I also brought up an image that depicted the somatosensory representation of our body across the cortex. They were amazed to see how distorted/uneven the actual representation appeared to be. As mentioned, regions of the body with smaller receptive field size and greater acuity occupy significantly larger areas on the cortex (most notably the face and