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Dynamic Displacement Vector Interacts with Tactile Localization

Dupin, L; Haggard, P; (2019) Dynamic Displacement Vector Interacts with Tactile Localization. Current Biology , 29 (3) 492-498.e3. 10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.032. Green open access

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Abstract

Locating a tactile stimulus on the body seems effortless and straightforward. However, the perceived location of a tactile stimulation can differ from its physical location [1, 2, 3]. Tactile mislocalizations can depend on the timing of successive stimulations [2, 4, 5], tactile motion mechanisms [6], or processes that “remap” stimuli from skin locations to external space coordinates [7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. We report six experiments demonstrating that the perception of tactile localization on a static body part is strongly affected by the displacement between the locations of two successive task-irrelevant actions. Participants moved their index finger between two keys. Each keypress triggered synchronous tactile stimulation at a randomized location on the immobilized wrist or forehead. Participants reported the location of the second tactile stimulation relative to the first. The direction of either active finger movements or passive finger displacements biased participants’ tactile orientation judgements (experiment 1). The effect generalized to tactile stimuli delivered to other body sites (experiment 2). Two successive keypresses, by different fingers at distinct locations, reproduced the effect (experiment 3). The effect remained even when the hand that moved was placed far from the tactile stimulation site (experiments 4 and 5). Temporal synchrony within 600 ms between the movement and tactile stimulations was necessary for the effect (experiment 6). Our results indicate that a dynamic displacement vector, defined as the location of one sensorimotor event relative to the one before, plays a strong role in structuring tactile spatial perception.

Type: Article
Title: Dynamic Displacement Vector Interacts with Tactile Localization
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.032
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.032
Language: English
Additional information: © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: touch, human, spatial perception, movement, attention, tactile localization
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10076195
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