Navigation in the fingertip

The tactile sense provides local motion information, such as the speed, the direction, and the duration of motion, of an object sliding on the fingertip. An optimal observer should be able to represent the displacement of the object, or the displacement of its own finger on a surface, by integrating these local motion cues over time. In navigation, this skill is known as path integration. We determined human performance for path integration in the fingertip. For this purpose, we develop an experimental task equivalent to the triangle completion task, which is commonly used in locomotion research to study path integration.