The human tickle response and mechanisms of self-tickle suppression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A tickle is a complex sensation: it occurs in response to touch but not unequivocally so, and makes us laugh albeit not when we self-tickle. We quantified human ticklishness by means of physiological, visual and acoustic measures alongside subjective reports, and assessed mechanisms of self-tickle suppression. Tickle responses arose faster than previously reported as changes in thoracic circumference and joyous facial expressions co-emerge approximately 300 ms after tickle onset and are followed by vocalizations starting after an additional 200 ms. The timing and acoustic properties of vocalizations tightly correlated with subjective reports: the faster, louder and higher-pitched participants laughed, the stronger they rated the experienced ticklishness. Externally evoked ticklishness is reduced by simultaneous self-tickling, whereby self-touch evokes stronger suppression than sole self-tickle movement without touch. We suggest that self-tickle suppression can be understood as broad attenuation of sensory temporally coincident inputs. Our study provides new insight on the nature of human ticklishness and the attenuating effects of self-tickling. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".