Researchers from Johns Hopkins and Drexel universities say that adding haptics—an artificial sense of touch—to upper limb prostheses reduces the mental effort required to operate the device, bringing us closer to developing prosthetic technology that functions more like healthy limbs. In what researchers are calling the first study of its kind, the cross-institutional team used neuroimaging to investigate if haptic feedback would help people who use prosthetic hands to expend less mental effort while carrying out tasks. The team's findings were published today in Image caption: Using functional near infrared spectroscopy researchers measured mental effort of study participants as they performed simple tasks using a prosthetic hand.