Cognition overrides orientation dependence in tactile viewpoint selection.

Humans are capable of extracting spatial information through their sense of touch: when someone strokes their hand, they can easily determine stroke direction without visual information. However, when it comes to the coordinate system used to assign the spatial relations to the stimulation, it remains poorly understood how the brain selects the appropriate system for passive touch. In the study reported here, we investigated whether hand orientation can determine coordinate assignment to ambiguous tactile patterns, whether observers can cognitively override any orientation-driven perspectives on touch, and whether the adaptation transfers across body surfaces.

Naturalistic stimulus structure determines the integration of audiovisual looming signals in binocular rivalry.

Rapid integration of biologically relevant information is crucial for the survival of an organism. Most prominently, humans should be biased to attend and respond to looming stimuli that signal approaching danger (e.g.

Temporal ventriloquism in a purely temporal context.

This study examines how audiovisual signals are combined in time for a temporal analogue of the ventriloquist effect in a purely temporal context, that is, no spatial grounding of signals or other spatial facilitation. Observers were presented with two successive intervals, each defined by a 1250-ms tone, and indicated in which interval a brief audiovisual stimulus (visual flash + noise burst) occurred later. In "test" intervals, the audiovisual stimulus was presented with a small asynchrony, while in "probe" intervals it was synchronous and presented at various times guided by an adaptive staircase to find the perceived temporal location of the asynchronous stimulus.

Extending visual dominance over touch for input off the body.

Vision tends to dominate over touch in the majority of experimental situations, particularly when visual information is presented on, or near to, the body. We combined two visual dominance paradigms in order to investigate crossmodal interactions between vision and touch for stimuli on versus off the body: 1) The Colavita visual dominance effect, which has recently been extended to vision and touch, and 2) The rubber hand illusion, which has often been used to probe visuotactile interactions. Specifically, we investigated whether moving a visual stimulus off the participant's body would affect visual dominance, and how this dominance would be mediated by the presence/absence of a rubber hand (given the rubber hand illusion provides a way of extending the representation of one's own body in space).