SENSATION OF RESISTOR-INDUCED WARMTH IN BLIND PERSONS

It is commonly believed that the human sense of warmth is inferior in spatiotemporal acuity to the tactile senses. However, little or no evi dence is available about the active feeling of warmth. We investigated the ability of people to detect in an active way small changes of war mth on very small areas (2-mm x 2-mm resistors). To that end, a new pr ocedure was developed to measure perception of warmth. The results ind icate that people who are able to detect the warmth stimuli perceive s mall incremental changes and that detection performance improves as st imulus intensity increases. Male subjects seem to be less sensitive th an female subjects at lower levels of stimulation, but this relationsh ip is reversed at higher levels of stimulation.