Date: Thursday 12/10/2023, 3:30 pm (GMT+2/Warsaw time)
Join online: zoom link
Join live: s. 3099, Wydział Geologii UW, ul. Żwirki i Wigury 93
Title: Phantom Touch: an illusory tactile sensation without tactile input
Abstract
You cannot tickle yourself. This is because the brain cancels out the predictable tactile signals from your skin. But what happens if there is no tactile input to suppress? To test this, we used immersive virtual reality scenarios in which subjects touched their body using a virtual object. This resulted in a tingling sensation corresponding to the location touched on the virtual body. We called it “phantom touch illusion” (PTI). Interestingly, the illusion was also reported when subjects touched invisible (inferred) parts of their limb. We reason that this PTI results from tactile gating process during self-touch if there is no tactile input to suppress. The reported PTI when touching invisible body parts indicates that tactile gating is not exclusively based on vision, but rather on multi-sensory, top-down input involving body schema. This supplementary finding shows that representations of one’s own body are defined top-down, beyond the available sensory information.
This talk is a part of the Traincrease Lecture Series (D4.2).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952324.
