An inter-species computational analysis of vibrotactile sensitivity in Pacinian and Herbst corpuscles

Abstract

Vibration sensing is ubiquitous among vertebrates, with the sensory end organ generally being a multilayered ellipsoidal structure. There is, however, a wide range of sizes and structural arrangements across species. In this work, we applied our earlier computational model of the Pacinian corpuscle to predict the sensory response of different species to various stimulus frequencies, and based on the results, we identified the optimal frequency for vibration sensing and the bandwidth over which frequencies should be most detectable. We found that although the size and layering of the corpuscles were very different, almost all of the 19 species studied showed very similar sensitivity ranges. The human and goose were the notable exceptions, with their corpuscle tuned to higher frequencies (130–170 versus 40–50 Hz). We observed no correlation between animal size and any measure of corpuscle geometry in our model. Based on the results generated by our computational model, we hypothesize that lamellar corpuscles across different species may use different sizes and structures to achieve similar frequency detection bands.

Keywords

• touch
• biomechanics
• neuroscience
• computational modelling