Development of Touch

Among the four somesthetic qualities of touch, warmth, coolness, and pain described by Mountcastle (2005), touch is the most difficult to define due to its multimodality. The sense of touch is enabled by “afferents sensitive to mechanical stimulation of the skin; they provide signals to the brain concerning the form, texture, location, intensity, movement, direction, and temporal cadence of mechanical stimuli, forms of somesthesis highly developed in the hand” (Mountcastle 2005, p. 72).