Jiajia Yang Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in Health Systems, Okayama University, Japan

Understanding the underlying neural mechanism of “comfortable tactile sensation” will benefit high-quality products designs. Both the basic subjects’ physical features (e.g., surface roughness, softness) and emotional features contribute to the comfortable tactile sensation, however, little is known about how the information interacted with each other in the human brain to create the comfortable feel. In the present project, to approach this issue, we will use the new technique laminar fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to acquire sub-millimeter brain activation data at 7T during the comfortable tactile sensation tasks. This project will open a new dimension (cortical layer direction) for examining the neural basis underlying comfortable tactile sensation and help in understanding the super-hierarchical brain function of the comfortable tactile sensation.