Feeling darkness: a visually induced somatosensory illusion

Although the five primary senses have traditionally been thought of as separate, examples of their interactions, as well as the neural substrate possibly underlying them, have been identified. Arm position sense, for example, depends on touch, proprioception, and spatial vision of the limb. It is, however, unknown whether position sense is also influenced by more fundamental, nonspatial visual information. Here, we report an illusion that demonstrates that the position sense of the eyelid partly depends on information regarding the relative illumination reported by the two eyes. When only one eye is dark-adapted and both eyes are exposed to a dim environment, the lid of the light-adapted eye feels closed or "droopy." The effect decreases when covering the eye by hand or a patch, thus introducing tactile information congruent with the interocular difference in vision. This reveals that the integration of vision with touch and proprioception is not restricted to higher-level spatial vision, but is instead a more fundamental aspect of sensory processing than has been previously shown.