Decoding passive tactile shape from functional MRI signals

Decoding passive tactile shapes is a challenge in neuroscience. In this study, we extracted BOLD signals from three regions of interest, the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), the lateral occipital cortex (LOC), and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). All are known to be the shared areas between visions and haptics. Then we used a VDVAE (Very Deep Variational Auto-Encoder) to visualize the haptic information from these areas. This approach opens a new way for explaining the human tactile perception and possibly contributes to haptic-related diagnosis in future work.