| Summary: | The location of touch can be represented in a somatotopic reference frame and, combined with proprioceptive information, in an external reference frame. There is evidence that body position influences where individuals feel touch on the skin surface, indicating that proprioceptive information affects tactile localization in a somatotopic reference frame. In conditions with visual and proprioceptive mismatch of body position, where do individuals feel touch on the body? We used the mirror box illusion to address this question. Participants placed 1 hand on each side of a mirror aligned with the body midline, such that the hand reflection in the mirror looked like the hand hidden behind the mirror. The illusion creates a spatial mismatch between the actual hidden hand position and where the participant perceives their hand to be (the mirror image location). Across three experiments, localization judgments on the hidden hand were consistently and systematically biased toward the actual hand position relative to the viewed hand position. These findings provide evidence that proprioceptive estimates of limb position influence tactile localization and are discussed in relation to two models of tactile localization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) <strong xmlns:lang="en">Public Significance Statement—Where do people feel a touch when the viewed hand is displaced from its actual position? In the classic rubber hand illusion, people feel touch on the seen rubber hand when it is brushed in synchrony with their unseen actual hand. But does the actual hand still influence tactile perception? Using the mirror box illusion, we found that when there was spatial mismatch between visual and proprioceptive information of hand position, the perceived location of tactile stimuli on the skin surface was systematically biased toward the proprioceptively-defined hand position compared to baseline. These results provide evidence that the actual hand position exerts influence on tactile localization, adding to past findings that information from external space affects tactile localization in somatotopic space. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) © 2021 American Psychological Association
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