OBJECTIVE The Somatic Signal Detection Task (SSDT; Lloyd, Manson, Brown and Poliakoff, 2008) is an innovative paradigm to study perceptual processes related to physical symptoms. It allows examining touch illusions as a laboratory analog of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) according to the cognitive model of MUS proposed by Brown (2004). The present study compared psychopathologic measures ...

The present study aims to investigate the effect of voluntary movements on human temporal perception in multisensory integration. We therefore performed temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks in audio-tactile integration under three conditions: no movement, involuntary movement, and voluntary movement. It is known that the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) under the no movement condition, tha...

We report two psychophysical experiments designed to investigate the effects of non touch-produced sounds on the tactile perception of roughness and length. Previous studies have demonstrated that the tactile roughness perception of object surfaces is modified by sounds elicited by rubbing the surfaces. In this study, we examined the crossmodal effects of non touch-produced sounds such as white...

We investigated whether the visual hMT+ cortex plays a role in supramodal representation of sensory flow, not mediated by visual mental imagery. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in sighted and congenitally blind individuals during passive perception of optic and tactile flows. Visual motion-responsive cortex, including hMT+, was identified in the lateral ...

Musicians often say that they not only hear but also "feel" music. To explore the contribution of tactile information to "feeling" music, we investigated the degree that auditory and tactile inputs are integrated in humans performing a musical meter-recognition task. Subjects discriminated between two types of sequences, "duple" (march-like rhythms) and "triple" (waltz-like rhythms), presented ...

When observers view ambiguous visual stimuli, their perception will often alternate between the possible interpretations, a phenomenon termed perceptual rivalry [1]. To induce perceptual rivalry in the tactile domain, we developed a new tactile illusion, based on the visual apparent-motion quartet [2]. Pairs of 200 ms vibrotactile stimuli were applied to the finger pad at intervals separated by...

In task-environments with limited visibility (e.g. rescue workers in smoke), individuals rely on tactile perception as a primary mode of data acquisition. They need to translate tactile information into three-dimensional images, to solve problems mentally, before translating them into motor actions. To assess this ability in an inexpensive, standardised way, the Tupperware Neuropsychological Ta...

Previous studies have shown that neural oscillations in the 8- to 12-Hz range influence sensory perception. In the current study, we examined whether both the power and phase of these mu/alpha oscillations predict successful conscious tactile perception. Near-threshold tactile stimuli were applied to the left hand while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded over the contralateral ...