Visual enhancement of touch and the bodily self
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty-two volunteers (13 female) between 18 and 54 years of age participated. Participants were naïve to the experimental hypotheses, and the study was approved by the local ethical committee.
Apparatus and stimuli
Participants sat with their right hand resting palm up on a table. Their right index finger rested on a pedestal which kept it stationary so that stimuli could be applied consistently to the fingertip. Participants wore a black smock which covered their arms so they could not see them directly. They
Visual enhancement effects
The inverse efficiency principle suggests that multisensory integration effects are strongest when individual sensory channels are weakest. Thus, we would expect that VET effects should be largest for participants performing close to chance. VET effects were computed by taking the difference in performance following synchronous stroking and both asynchronous stroking and no brushing; overall acuity was computed by taking the overall average performance, across conditions. There was a
Discussion
Two principal effects were observed in the present study. First, the characteristic inverse efficiency pattern for VET was observed even when stimuli were held constant at test; performance overall was negatively related to the difference in performance following synchronous stroking and both asynchronous stroking and no brushing. This confirms the similarity between VET and other forms of multisensory interaction (Stein & Meredith, 1993). It also points to a possible functional role of VET, in
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant BB/D009529/1 and a grant from the Bial Foundation to PH. Portions of the data were previously presented at the annual conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Marseille, France, August, 2007.
References (47)
- et al.
Looking for the agent: An investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients
Cognition
(1997) - et al.
Tactile perception, cortical representation and the bodily self
Current Biology
(2003) The law of inverse effectiveness in neurons and behaviour: Multisensory integration versus normal variability
Neuropsychologia
(2007)- et al.
Visually induced feelings of touch
Brain Research
(2006) - et al.
Noninformative vision improves the spatial resolution of touch in humans
Current Biology
(2001) - et al.
A touching sight: SII/PV activation during the observation and experience of touch
Neuron
(2004) - et al.
Can vision of the body ameliorate impaired somatosensory function?
Neuropsychologia
(2007) - et al.
Vision modulates somatosensory cortical processing
Current Biology
(2002) - et al.
Persistence of visual-tactile enhancement in humans
Neuroscience Letters
(2004) - et al.
Shared representations in body perception
Acta Psychologica
(2006)
A specific role for efferent information in self-recognition
Cognition
Somatosensory activations during the observation of touch and a case of vision-touch synaesthesia
Brain
Visual search improvement in hemianopic patients after audio-visual stimulation
Brain
Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see
Nature
Empathy for pain and touch in the human somatosensory cortex
Cerebral Cortex
Body mereology
An event-related brain potential study of cross-modal links in spatial attention between vision and touch
Psychophysiology
Humans integrate visual and haptic information in a statistically optimal fashion
Nature
Left tactile extinction following visual stimulation of a rubber hand
Brain
Viewing the body prepares the brain for touch: Effects of TMS over somatosensory cortex
European Journal of Neuroscience
Enhancement of visual perception by crossmodal visuo-auditory interaction
Experimental Brain Research
Body image and body schema: A conceptual clarification
Journal of Mind and Behavior
How the body shapes the mind
Cited by (88)
Are blind individuals immune to bodily illusions? Somatic rubber hand illusion in the blind revisited
2024, Behavioural Brain ResearchManual therapy: Exploiting the role of human touch
2019, Musculoskeletal Science and PracticeThe rubber hand universe: On the impact of methodological differences in the rubber hand illusion
2019, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Because participants do not need to touch the artificial hand during the experiment, the different materials of which the artificial hand can consist of (rubber, wood, plastic, etc.) is rather irrelevant for the illusion itself, as long as the artificial hand is unequivocally recognized as an external object that does not belong to the own body (Fig. 2A). However, in many studies the artificial hand was not an external object at all, but instead the mirror reflection of the participant’s own contralateral hand (Fig. 2B; Holmes et al., 2006, 2004; Holmes and Spence, 2005; Longo et al., 2008a; Ro et al., 2004; Snijders et al., 2007; Tajima et al., 2015) or the video-recorded image of the ipsilateral hand (Fig. 2C; Abdulkarim and Ehrsson, 2018; Gentile et al., 2013; Kammers et al., 2009b; Longo and Haggard, 2009; Newport et al., 2010; Newport and Preston, 2010; Pavani and Zampini, 2007; Tsakiris et al., 2010a, 2006). Both the application of mirror and video images in the RHI have some important advantages compared to the use of prosthetic hands.
Visual perception of the arm manipulates the experienced pleasantness of touch
2019, Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :Moreover, Rock and Victor (1964) found that the visual modality is dominant, for example in visuo-tactile conflicts that arise during multisensory bodily illusions (see e.g. de Vignemont, Ehrsson et al., 2005), such as the Rubber Hand Illusion (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998). Others found that tactile perception can be altered after manipulating visual information of the touched limb (i.e. enlarging it) (Taylor-Clarke et al., 2004; Longo et al., 2008). Visual dominance was also demonstrated by McKenzie and Newport (2015) using the so-called crawling skin illusion in which pixelated moving static was projected on real-time video images of the arms of participants.