What is discriminative touch sensation?

Fine touch (or discriminative touch) is a sensory modality that allows a subject to sense and localize touch. The form of touch where localization is not possible is known as crude touch.

What kinds of touch receptors are found in the skin?

The main categories of touch receptor are called thermoreceptors, chemoreceptors, and mechanoreceptors. Thermoreceptors1 are like the thermometer notification for your skin receptors, designed to detect changes in the temperature of the outer skin layers.

What are the 3 touch receptors?

Mechanoreceptors: These receptors perceive sensations such as pressure, vibrations, and texture. There are four known types of mechanoreceptors whose only function is to perceive indentions and vibrations of the skin: Merkel’s disks, Meissner’s corpuscles, Ruffini’s corpuscles, and Pacinian corpuscles.

What are the main receptors for fine discriminative touch sensations?

Merkel cells are considered to be the fine tactile receptors of the discriminative touch system that provide cues used to localize tactile stimuli and to perceive the edges (shape or form) of objects.

Which structure is important for discriminative touch?

The posterior (dorsal) column – medial lemniscal pathway (i.e., the medial lemniscal pathway) carries and processes discriminative touch and proprioceptive information from the body (Figure 4.5).

Which receptor is involved in discriminative touch and light pressure?

Merkel cells
Merkel cells are considered to be the fine tactile receptors of the discriminative touch system that provide cues used to localize tactile stimuli and to perceive the edges (shape or form) of objects.

What are the 5 skin receptors?

Receptors on the skin There are six different types of mechanoreceptors detecting innocuous stimuli in the skin: those around hair follicles, Pacinian corpuscles, Meissner corpuscles, Merkel complexes, Ruffini corpuscles, and C-fiber LTM (low threshold mechanoreceptors).

Which sensory receptor is responsible for discriminative touch and located in the stratum Basale?

Meissner corpuscles consist of a cutaneous nerve ending responsible for transmitting the sensations of fine, discriminative touch and vibration. [1] Meissner corpuscles are most sensitive to low-frequency vibrations between 10 to 50 Hertz and can respond to skin indentations of less than 10 micrometers.

Which receptor is responsible for two-point discrimination?

The tactile system, which is activated in the two-point discrimination test, employs several types of receptors. A tactile sensory receptor can be defined as the peripheral ending of a sensory neuron and its accessory structures, which may be part of the nerve cell or may come from epithelial or connective tissue.

What do Meissner corpuscles detect?

[1] Meissner corpuscles are most sensitive to low-frequency vibrations between 10 to 50 Hertz and can respond to skin indentations of less than 10 micrometers. Additionally, these corpuscles may detect the sensation of slip between an object and the skin, allowing for grip control.

How many touch receptors are in the skin?

They also register pain as well as warmth and cold. Your pain receptors are the most numerous. Every square centimetre of your skin contains around 200 pain receptors but only 15 receptors for pressure, 6 for cold and 1 for warmth.

What parts of the body are most and least sensitive to two-point discrimination?

Different areas of the body have receptive fields of different sizes, giving some better resolution in two-point discrimination. Areas including the fingertips, lips, and tongue have very high resolution, and therefore are the most sensitive. Other areas like the forearms, calves, and back are the least sensitive.

Why are some areas of the skin more sensitive than others?

The receptors in our skin are not distributed in a uniform way around our bodies. Some places, such as our fingers and lips, have more touch receptors than other parts of our body, such as our backs. That is one reason why we are more sensitive to touch on our fingers and face than on our backs.

Which area of the skin has the best two-point discrimination?

They advised that the skin must be touched simultaneously and with equal pressure to accurately test two-point discrimination. These authors concurred that the tip of the tongue (1.5 mm) and finger tips (2–3 mm) were far more sensitive than the cheeks and the back of the hands (12 mm).