Dataset Information

Buddha's ear illusion: Immediate and extensive earlobe deformation through visuotactile stimulation.

ABSTRACT: The classical body ownership illusion, such as the rubber hand illusion, is achieved through appropriate proprioceptive displacement within temporal and spatial constraints that do not exceed the limits of proprioceptive flexibility. In the 2023 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, we introduced Buddha's ear illusion (BEI), which creates the illusion of owning a dramatically deformed earlobe through immediate visuotactile stimulation and seemingly challenges classical proprioceptive boundaries. The laboratory experiment examined the mechanics of this illusion, revealing a significant interaction between tactile earlobe pulling and visual miming that contributed to the enhanced perception of earlobe stretch. Importantly, 88% of the participants confirmed the illusory earlobe stretch (a rating of +4 or higher on a 7-point scale). More than half reported an earlobe descent of >10 cm within a 10-s visuotactile stimulation. The findings suggest that BEI operates on a distinct principle separate from proprioceptive modulation in contrast to classical ownership illusions.

SUBMITTER: Kodaka K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11320686 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul-Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Buddha's ear illusion: Immediate and extensive earlobe deformation through visuotactile stimulation.

Kodaka Kenri K Sato Yutaro Y

i-Perception 20240723 4

The classical body ownership illusion, such as the rubber hand illusion, is achieved through appropriate proprioceptive displacement within temporal and spatial constraints that do not exceed the limits of proprioceptive flexibility. In the 2023 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, we introduced <i>Buddha's ear illusion</i> (BEI), which creates the illusion of owning a dramatically deformed earlobe through immediate visuotactile stimulation and seemingly challenges classical proprioceptive boundar ...[more]

PMID: 39139550

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Project description:The rubber hand illusion describes a phenomenon in which participants experience a rubber hand as being part of their body by the synchronous application of visuotactile stimulation to the real and the artificial limb. In the recently introduced robotic hand illusion (RobHI), a robotic hand is incorporated into one's body representation due to the integration of synchronous visuomotor information. However, there are no setups so far that combine visuotactile and visuomotor feedback, which is expected to unravel mechanisms that cannot be detected in experimental designs applying this information in isolation. We developed a robotic hand, controlled by a sensor glove and equipped with pressure sensors, and varied systematically and separately the synchrony for motor feedback (MF) and tactile feedback (TF). In Experiment 1, we implemented a ball-grasping task and assessed the perceived proprioceptive drift of one's own hand as a behavioral measure of the spatial calibration of body coordinates as well as explicit embodiment experiences by a questionnaire. Results revealed significant main effects of both MF and TF for proprioceptive drift data, but we only observed main effects for MF on perceived embodiment. Furthermore, for the proprioceptive drift we found that synchronous feedback in one factor compensates for asynchronous feedback in the other. In Experiment 2, including a new sample of naïve participants, we further explored this finding by adding unimodal conditions, in which we manipulated the presence or absence of MF and/or TF. These findings replicated the results from Experiment 1 and we further found evidence for a supper-additive multisensory effect on spatial body representation caused by the presence of both factors. Results on conscious body perception were less consistent across both experiments. The findings indicate that sensory and motor input equally contribute to the representation of spatial body coordinates which for their part are subject to multisensory enhancing effects. The results outline the potential of human-in-the-loop approaches and might have important implications for clinical applications such as for the future design of robotic prostheses.

Dataset Information

Buddha's ear illusion: Immediate and extensive earlobe deformation through visuotactile stimulation.

Publications

Buddha's ear illusion: Immediate and extensive earlobe deformation through visuotactile stimulation.

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