Better Grip with Wrinkly Fingers? MDC-Researchers find no Proof
For their study the neuroscientists had asked 40 volunteers – mostly undergraduate and graduate students – to participate. To begin with, the participants had to bathe both hands in warm water (40 ºC) for half an hour to induce fingertip wrinkling. The subjects were then asked to transfer 52 dry or wet objects – glass marbles, rubber balls, plastic dice and brass weights – from one container to another via a small 5 cm diameter hole in walled partition. The subjects repeated the task with dry, unwrinkled fingertips.
It turned out the wrinkled fingers offered no advantage over nonwrinkled fingers. In both experiments dexterity was the same and there was no influence on touch sensitivity. Although they used exactly the same experimental design, the MDC researchers could not reproduce the result that wrinkling was good for dexterity that was published by neurobiologists from the University of Newcastle, United Kingdom, which received a lot of attention in the media at the beginning of 2013.
What are wrinkled fingers good for? Julia Haseleu: “It is quite questionable, if they are of any advantage at all. It could well be that wrinkled fingers happen after skin blood vessels constrict, and that is it.”
*Water-induced finger wrinkles do not affect touch acuity or dexterity in handling wet objects
Julia Haseleu1*, Damir Omerbašić1*, Henning Frenzel1,Manfred Gross2and Gary R Lewin1
1 Department of Neuroscience, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin-Buch, Germany
2 Department of Audiology and Phoniatrics, CharitéUniversitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany
* These authors contributed equally
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