A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology tested the hypothesis that hepatic encephalopathy (HE) patients have impaired tactile temporal discrimination abilities and, thus, require a longer stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between two tactile stimuli to perceive the stimuli as two temporally distinct events. Here, patients with varying grades of HE and age-matched healthy individuals performed a tactile temporal discrimination task. All participants received two tactile stimuli with varying SOA applied to their left index finger and were instructed to report on how many distinct stimuli they perceived ("1" vs. "2"). The results showed that HE patients needed a significantly longer SOA (138.0 ± 11.3 ms) between two tactile stimuli to perceive the stimuli as two temporally distinct events when compared to healthy controls (78.6 ± 13.1 ms). While the temporal discrimination ability in the tactile modality correlated positively with the temporal discrimination ability in the visual domain across all participants (negative correlation between tactile SOA and visual critical flicker frequency [CFF]). The findings indicated that temporal tactile perception is substantially impaired in HE patients. In addition, tactile and visual discrimination abilities are affected in HE patients. It was speculated that the known global slowing of neuronal oscillations in HE might represent such a common mechanism.