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Sense Of Touch Enhanced By Fingerprints
Led by Georges Debregeas at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the research team rubbed an artificial fingertip across rough surfaces, and found that the tiny ridges on our fingers help us to grip objects by increasing friction.
They discovered that the ridges also amplify vibrations triggered when fingertips brush across an uneven surface, helping transmit the signals to deeply embedded nerves involved in fine texture perception.
For the study, the physicists covered a pressure-detecting sensor, acting as a nerve fibre, with an elastic material that was either smooth, or patterned with fingerprint-like ridges.
They then moved the ''fingertip'' over a glass slide that had been covered with raised lines of uneven spacing and thickness, which made the artificial skin to vibrate at varying frequencies that could be detected by the sensor.
Mark Hollins a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said that using an artificial device to determine the role of fingerprints is "very novel.
In their studies on real fingertips, they had shown that humans feel fine textures by moving their fingers over a surface and triggering vibrations in the skin, which are picked up by nerves.
However, some of the nerve endings, called Pacinian corpuscles, are relatively deep, about 2 millimetres, under the skin, raising questions about how they could detect such subtle vibrations.
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