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The selective effect of the image of a hand on visuotactile interactions as assessed by performance on the crossmodal congruency task

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Abstract

Seeing one’s own body (either directly or indirectly) can influence visuotactile crossmodal interactions. Previously, it has been shown that even viewing a simple line drawing of a hand can also modulate such crossmodal interactions, as if viewing the picture of a hand somehow primes the representation of one’s own hand. However, factors other than the sight of a symbolic picture of a hand may have modulated the crossmodal interactions reported in previous research. In the present study, we examined the crossmodal modulatory effects of viewing five different visual images (photograph of a hand, line drawing of a hand, line drawing of a car, an U-shape, and an ellipse) on tactile performance. Participants made speeded discrimination responses regarding the location of brief vibrotactile targets presented to either the tip or base of their left index finger, while trying to ignore visual distractors presented to either the left or right of central fixation. We compared the visuotactile congruency effects elicited when the five different visual images were presented superimposed over the visual distractors. Participants’ tactile discrimination performance was modulated to a significantly greater extent by viewing the photograph of a hand than when viewing the outline drawing of a hand. No such crossmodal congruency effects were reported in any of the other conditions. These results therefore suggest that visuotactile interactions are specifically modulated by the image of the hand rather than just by any simple orientation cues that may be provided by the image of a hand.

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Notes

  1. This selective orthogonal spatial correspondence could not be explained simply by the existence of an orthogonal spatial compatibility effect (cf. Cho and Proctor 2003; Lippa and Adam 2001) because we aligned the response array with that of the tactile target and used only a stimulus–response compatible condition (i.e., near and near vs. far and far) in order to specifically investigate the modulatory effect of task irrelevant visual stimuli. Even if the orthogonal spatial compatibility occurred between the array of visual stimuli versus that of tactile stimuli and response buttons other than the visuotactile congruency effects, it should not have affected the present results because, though the possible relations between them were equivalent between each image type conditions, the crossmodal congruency effects were observed only in the hand image conditions.

  2. It is perhaps also worth drawing out the link here to the independent body of research on the spatial cuing of attention that has shown that even a cartoon-line drawing of someone’s face can lead to gaze-contingent shifts of a participant’s visual and tactile spatial attention (e.g., Soto-Faraco et al. 2006).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Norimichi Kitagawa for helpful comments on this study. Yuka Igarashi was supported by a JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists. Shigeru Ichihara was supported by Grants in Aid for Scientific Research, Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, Japan (No. 18530564).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami-Osawa, Hachioji, Tokyo, 192-0397, Japan

    Yuka Igarashi & Shigeru Ichihara

  2. Graduate School of Cognitive Psychology, in Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Yota Kimura

  3. Crossmodal Research Group, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Charles Spence

Authors
  1. Yuka Igarashi
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  2. Yota Kimura
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  3. Charles Spence
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  4. Shigeru Ichihara
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Correspondence to Yuka Igarashi.

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Igarashi, Y., Kimura, Y., Spence, C. et al. The selective effect of the image of a hand on visuotactile interactions as assessed by performance on the crossmodal congruency task. Exp Brain Res 184, 31–38 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-007-1076-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-007-1076-z

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