Interhemispheric communication during haptic self-perception

Abstract

During the haptic exploration of a planar surface, slight resistances against the hand's movement are illusorily perceived as asperities (bumps) in the surface. If the surface being touched is one's own skin, an actual bump would also produce increased tactile pressure from the moving finger onto the skin. We investigated how kinaesthetic and tactile signals combine to produce haptic perceptions during self-touch. Participants performed two successive movements with the right hand. A haptic force-control robot applied resistances to both movements, and participants judged which movement was felt to contain the larger bump. An additional robot delivered simultaneous but task-irrelevant tactile stroking to the left forearm. These strokes contained either increased or decreased tactile pressure synchronized with the resistance-induced illusory bump encountered by the right hand. We found that the size of bumps perceived by the right hand was enhanced by an increase in left tactile pressure, but also by a decrease. Tactile event detection was thus transferred interhemispherically, but the sign of the tactile information was not respected. Randomizing (rather than blocking) the presentation order of left tactile stimuli abolished these interhemispheric enhancement effects. Thus, interhemispheric transfer during bimanual self-touch requires a stable model of temporally synchronized events, but does not require geometric consistency between hemispheric information, nor between tactile and kinaesthetic representations of a single common object.