External location of touch is constructed post-hoc based on limb choice

Abstract
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Abstract

When humans indicate on which hand a tactile stimulus occurred, they often err when their hands are crossed. This finding seemingly supports the view that the automatically determined touch location in external space affects limb assignment: the crossed right hand is localized in left space, and this conflict presumably provokes hand assignment errors. Here, participants judged on which hand the first of two stimuli, presented during a bimanual movement, had occurred, and then indicated its external location by a reach-to-point movement. When participants incorrectly chose the hand stimulated second, they pointed to where that hand had been at the correct, first time point, though no stimulus had occurred at that location. This behavior suggests that stimulus localization depended on hand assignment, not vice versa. It is, thus, incompatible with the notion of automatic computation of external stimulus location upon occurrence. Instead, humans construct external touch location post-hoc and on demand.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data and Matlab/R analysis files have been provided for all data and data figures at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/ybxn5/).

Article and author information

Author details

Femke Maij

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Christian Seegelke

Faculty of Psychology & Sports Science, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9624-6395
W Pieter Medendorp

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Centre for Cognition (DCC), Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9615-4220
Tobias Heed

Faculty of Psychology and Sports Science and Excellence Cluster Cognitive Interaction Technology (Citec), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

For correspondence
tobias.heed@uni-bielefeld.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5632-6091

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (He 6368/1-1)

Tobias Heed

Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (EU-ERC-283567)

W Pieter Medendorp

H2020 European Research Council (NWO-VICI: 453-11-001)

W Pieter Medendorp

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The study was part of a research program approved by the ethics committee of the German Psychological Society (DGPs), advisory opinions TB 10_2011 and TB_10_2011_Add 082013. Experiment 2, which was run at a different university after the move of the last author, was again approved by Bielefeld University's ethics committee, ref.nr. 2017-114. Twelve right-handed participants (aged 19-31 years, 7 female) gave informed consent to take part in the experiment.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.