Touch Receptors Lab

The purpose of the lab conducted by the lab group was to figure out which parts of the human body had the most touch receptors. The proposed hypothesis stated that touch receptors would have a greater concentration if the specific body part has a function relating to the touch receptors. For instance, fingers and facial features should have the most and parts of the neck, hand, wrist, and ear should have less touch receptors than the other parts because the former have greater function that relates to human senses. In the experiment using the steel calipers, the hypothesis was proven to be correct because the expected results mentioned above were supported by the measurements collected. For example, parts of the hand and fingers were able to sense one point between 1-10mm but the parts of the arm and ear had to go above 20mm to sense one point.
Comparing the hands to the back, the hands have a lot more touch receptors than the back do because the function of the hands are to provide the sense of touch and react to stimuli while the function of the back is not so much the same as that of the hands. Some human errors that could have occurred could have been uneven placement of the steel calipers on the surface of the skin so either too much or too little pressure was being exerted. Another errors could have been inaccurate readings of the calipers or moving the calipers too fast for the touch receptors to react. However, none of these errors were encountered by the lab group because the results obtained matched the expected