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| Women Tend to Have Better Sense of Touch Due to Smaller Finger Size |
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| SciMed - Biology | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Thursday, 31 December 2009 10:00 | |||
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Hamilton, Ontario, CAN. People who have smaller fingers have a finer sense of touch, according to new research in The Journal of Neuroscience. This finding explains why women tend to have better tactile acuity than men, because women on average have smaller fingers. To learn why the sexes have different finger sensitivity, researchers measured index fingertip size in 100 people. Each participant's tactile acuity was tested by pressing progressively narrower parallel grooves against a stationary fingertip — the tactile equivalent of the optometrist's eye chart. They found that people with smaller fingers could discern tighter grooves. The authors also explored why more petite fingers are more acute. Tinier digits likely have more closely spaced sensory receptors, the authors concluded. Several types of sensory receptors line the skin's interior and each detect a specific kind of outside stimulation. Some receptors, named Merkel cells, respond to static indentations (like pressing parallel grooves), while others capture vibrations or movement.
London, United Kingdom. New findings argue for the persistence of sex-linked chromosomes, such as the male Y  chromosome, refuting theories that the Y is doomed to extinction.
The results confirm that although these chromosom...When the skin is stimulated, activated receptors signal the central Much like pixels in a photograph, each skin receptor sends an aspect of the tactile image to the brain — more receptors per inch supply a clearer image. To find out whether receptors are more densely packed in smaller fingers, the authors measured the distance between sweat pores in some of the students, because Merkel cells cluster around the bases of sweat pores. People with smaller fingers had greater sweat pore density, which means their receptors are probably more closely spaced.
"The difference between the sexes appears to be entirely due to the relative size of the person's fingertips," said Ethan Lerner, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital, and unaffiliated with the study. Larner examined the results and says "So, a man with fingertips that are smaller than a woman's will be more sensitive to touch than the woman." "Previous studies from other laboratories suggested that individuals of the same age have about the same number of vibration receptors in their fingertips." "Smaller fingers would then have more closely spaced vibration receptors," Goldreich said. "Our results suggest that this same relationship between finger size and receptor spacing occurs for the Merkel cells." Whether the total number of Merkel cell clusters remains fixed in adults and how the sense of touch fluctuates in children as they age is still unknown. Goldreich and his colleagues plan to determine how tactile acuity changes as a finger grows and receptors grow farther apart. CitationThe research was supported by the National Eye Institute and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council in Canada.
CitationDiminutive Digits Discern Delicate Details: Fingertip Size and the Sex Difference in Tactile Spatial Acuity. Ryan M. Peters, Erik Hackeman, and Daniel Goldreich. J. Neurosci 2009; 29(50): 15756-15761. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3684-09.2009.
Abstract We have observed that passive tactile spatial acuity, the ability to resolve the spatial structure of surfaces pressed upon the skin, differs subtly but consistently between the sexes, with women able to perceive finer surface detail than men. Eschewing complex central explanations, we hypothesized that this sex difference in somatosensory perception might result from simple physical differences between the fingers of women and men. To investigate, we tested 50 women and 50 men on a tactile grating orientation task and measured the surface area of the participants' index fingertips. In subsets of participants, we additionally measured finger skin compliance and optically imaged the fingerprint microstructure to count sweat pores. We show here that tactile perception improves with decreasing finger size, and that this correlation fully explains the better perception of women, who on average have smaller fingers than men. Indeed, when sex and finger size are both considered in statistical analyses, only finger size predicts tactile acuity. Thus, a man and a woman with fingers of equal size will, on average, enjoy equal tactile acuity. We further show that sweat pores, and presumably the Merkel receptors beneath them, are packed more densely in smaller fingers.
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