Investigating upper limb perceptual asymmetries for unconstrained active exploration of stiffness cues

While many factors shape the preferential use of our hands, there is growing evidence that each hand may also perceive the environment differently. Currently, this has been demonstrated for proprioceptive and cutaneous cues, but our understanding of perceptual asymmetries for kinesthetic cues like stiffness is limited. In this manuscript, we measured JNDs of N=14 participants in an active stiffness discrimination task using their left and right hand. We found significant perceptual asymmetries between the two hands with left hand exploration leading to lower JNDs. Further investigation is needed, however, to understand the potential role of handedness in the observed perceptual asymmetries.