15:00 - 16:30
Tue—Casino_1.811—Poster2—57
Tue-Poster2
Room:
Room: Casino_1.811
Perception of self-generated tactile stimuli is enhanced independent of spatial alignment between action and sensation
Tue—Casino_1.811—Poster2—5705
Presented by: Belkis Ezgi Arikan
Belkis Ezgi Arikan 1, 2, 3*Katja Fiehler 2, 3
1 University Hospital Essen, Clinical Neurosciences, 2 Justus Liebig University Giessen, Department of Psychology, 3 Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior
Sensory stimuli generated by voluntary actions are perceived as weaker than those generated externally. This phenomenon is explained by internal forward models, where an efference copy of the motor command predicts the sensory consequences of an action and attenuates perception when the prediction matches the actual sensation. Spatial alignment between the action and the resulting sensation is found to play a critical role, with previous research showing stronger tactile suppression at locations spatially aligned with the movement compared to more distant locations. However, these studies did not control for the predictability of spatial alignment, i.e., when spatial separation is reliably expected, leaving the role of motor prediction unclear. Here we investigated whether predictable spatial separation between the moving effector and the resulting sensation leads to attenuation. Participants discriminated between two tactile vibrations, the first of which was self-generated via a button press. The vibrations were produced either by the right index or little finger, while the tactile stimulation was felt on the left index or little finger. In a rest condition, participants discriminated the same stimuli without performing a movement. We found tactile enhancement rather than attenuation across all conditions compared to when stimuli were presented at rest, regardless of spatial alignment between the moving finger and the stimulated finger. These findings indicate that spatial alignment may not be a necessary condition for the differential processing of self-generated tactile stimuli. Instead, the ability to flexibly form motor predictions for various action-sensation events may better reflect the demands of real-world contexts.
Keywords: tactile attenuation, spatial, internal models, motor prediction