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The disappearing hand: vestibular stimulation does not improve hand localisation

  • Grabherr, Luzia Psychiatric Liaison Service, University Hospital of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Russek, Leslie N. Clarkson University, Physical Therapy Department, Potsdam, NY, USA
  • Bellan, Valeria Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
  • Shohag, Mohammad School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
  • Camfferman, Danny School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
  • Moseley, G. Lorimer ORCID School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
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  • 2019-7-26
Published in:
  • PeerJ. - PeerJ. - 2019, vol. 7, p. e7201
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
General Neuroscience
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
General Medicine
English
Background
Bodily self-consciousness depends on the coherent integration of sensory information. In addition to visual and somatosensory information processing, vestibular contributions have been proposed and investigated. Vestibular information seems especially important for self-location, but remains difficult to study.


Methods
This randomised controlled experiment used the MIRAGE multisensory illusion box to induce a conflict between the visually- and proprioceptively-encoded position of one hand. Over time, the perceived location of the hand slowly shifts, due to the fact that proprioceptive input is progressively weighted more heavily than the visual input. We hypothesised that left cold caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS) augments this shift in hand localisation.


Results
The results from 24 healthy participants do not support our hypothesis: CVS had no effect on the estimations with which the perceived position of the hand shifted from the visually- to the proprioceptively-encoded position. Participants were more likely to report that their hand was ‘no longer there’ after CVS. Taken together, neither the physical nor the subjective data provide evidence for vestibular enhanced self-location.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/282081
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