ABSTRACT
Experimental psychology offers a perspective on the workings of the somatosensory system that is complementary to various “wet-lab” approaches considered by most chapters in this book. The latter address the neural mechanisms and neural representations that underlie how the somatosensory system processes information about the external world and about our bodies. Such approaches examine the relationship between the environment (external, internal) and the underlying neural responses. Experimental psychologists study how the intact organism processes those same environmental events in terms of the behavioral responses of the whole organism. Ultimately, our joint goal is to understand how organisms sense, perceive, think, represent, and act on the environment.
