Assessing the influence of a schematic drawing of the hand on tactile discrimination performance
Poster Presentation

Yuka Igarashi
Department of Psychology, Tokyo Metropolitan University

Norimichi Kitagawa
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation

Charles Spence
Crossmodal Research Group, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

*Shigeru Ichihara
Department of Psychology, Tokyo Metropolitan University

     Abstract ID Number: 42
     Full text: PDF
     Last modified: August 2, 2005

Abstract
Seeing one’s own body parts (either directly or indirectly) can influence visuotactile crossmodal interactions. Recently, we showed that even a simple line drawing of a hand can also modulate such crossmodal interactions, as if the picture of the hand somehow corresponds to the participants’ own hand. In the present study, we assessed the effect of the picture of a hand on speeded tactile discrimination performance. Participants had to discriminate the location of brief vibrotactile targets presented to either the tip or base of their forefinger, while trying to ignore simultaneously-presented visual distractors positioned horizontally. We compared the modulatory effect of the picture of a hand with that seen when the visual distractors were presented next to words describing the tip and base of the forefinger (Experiment 1), or were superimposed over arrows (i.e., another kind of directional stimulus; Experiment 2). Tactile discrimination performance was modulated in the hand picture condition, but not in either of the word or arrow conditions. These results suggest that visuotactile interactions were specifically modulated by the image of the hand rather than by cognitive cues such as simply semantically referring to the relevant body sites and the visual orientational cue of the hand.