Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This review says our sense of being a body comes from the brain combining many body signals. It describes three parts of bodily self-consciousness: self-identification (feeling a body is mine), self-location (where I feel I am), and the first-person perspective (the point from which I see). Experiments that create mismatched…
This paper reviews four computer models that try to reproduce how the glabrous (non-hairy) skin and its mechanoreceptors respond to touch. The authors explain why modelling is useful for researchers in psychology, robotics, and prosthetics, what the models cover (from stimulus to nerve spikes), and what they cannot yet do.…
This study tested whether people who are poor at hearing small pitch differences (congenital amusics) are worse at identifying emotions in speech. The researchers used normal speech, low-pass filtered speech (frequencies above ~500 Hz removed), and high-pass filtered speech (frequencies below ~4800 Hz removed). They found that worse pitch perception…
Researchers find that many people with autism process information from more than one sense differently, especially sound and sight. Studies report atypical audio-visual integration for both social cues (like faces and voices) and simple cues (like flashes and beeps). Some work links these differences to basic timing of perception and…
Researchers played three 3‑minute sound recordings to 68 university students: a natural dawn chorus of birds, that same recording with added traffic noise recorded at a 20 mi/h road, and the recording with traffic from a 40 mi/h road. Participants reported the lowest anxiety and stress and the most positive…
This paper traces the tuning fork from early ideas about bone hearing in the 1500s to its use in music and medicine today. The fork is a two-pronged metal tool that makes a steady pitch when struck. Doctors began using it to test hearing in the 1800s with the Weber…
This editorial introduces a Research Topic about how the brain combines different senses to make a sense of the body. The collected studies look at touch, space, body image, and rehab methods and show the brain is flexible in how it uses sensory signals. The editors also say we still…
