Vision of a pictorial hand modulates visual-tactile interactions

The participants in this study discriminated the position of tactile target stimuli presented at the tip or the base of the forefinger of one of the participants’ hands, while ignoring visual distractor stimuli. The visual distractor stimuli were presented from two circles on a display aligned with the tactile targets in Experiment 1 or orthogonal to them in Experiment 2. Tactile discrimination performance was slower and less accurate when the visual distractor stimuli were presented from incongruent locations relative to the tactile target stimuli (e.g., tactile target at the base of the finger with top visual distractor) highlighting a cross-modal congruency effect. We examined whether the presence and orientation of a simple line drawing of a hand, which was superimposed on the visual distractor stimuli, would modulate the cross-modal congruency effects. When the tactile targets and the visual distractors were spatially aligned, the modulatory effects of the hand picture were small (Experiment 1). However, when they were spatially misaligned, the effects were much larger, and the direction of the cross-modal congruency effects changed in accordance with the orientation of the picture of the hand, as if the hand picture corresponded to the participants’ own stimulated hand (Experiment 2). The results suggest that the two-dimensional picture of a hand can modulate processes maintaining our internal body representation. We also observed that the cross-modal congruency effects were influenced by the postures of the stimulated and the responding hands. These results reveal the complex nature of spatial interactions among vision, touch, and proprioception.