Abstract
Recent studies have shown that body-representations can be altered by dynamic changes in sound. In the so-called “auditory Pinocchio illusion” participants feel their finger to be longer when the action of pulling their finger is paired with a rising pitch. Here, we investigated whether preschool children - an age group in which multisensory body-representations are still fine-tuning - are also sensitive to this illusion. In two studies, sixty adult and sixty child participants heard sounds rising or falling in pitch while the experimenter concurrently pulled or pressed their index finger on a vertical (Experiment 1) or horizontal axis (Experiment 2). Results showed that the illusion was subjected to axis and age: both adults and children reported their finger to be longer in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. However, while in adults the feeling of finger elongation corresponded to a recalibration of the fingertip’s felt position upwards, this was not the case in children, who presented a dissociation between the feeling of finger elongation and the perceived fingertip position. Our results reveal that the ‘auditory Pinocchio illusion’ is constrained to the vertical dimension and suggest that multisensory interactions differently contribute to subjective feelings and sense of position depending on developmental stage.
Highlights
Recent studies have shown that body-representations can be altered by dynamic changes in sound
Our results reveal that the ‘auditory Pinocchio illusion’ is constrained to the vertical dimension and suggest that multisensory interactions differently contribute to subjective feelings and sense of position depending on developmental stage
Neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have shown that the brain receives information about the body from the eyes, the ears, the skin, and these signals are integrated in frontal, parietal and temporal convergence zones in the cortex[4,5]. Evidence that such multisensory interactions shape body representations comes from experiments in which body illusions were used; here, multisensory cues are commonly put into conflict to show that the brain responds to such conflict by creating distorted perceptions of the body
Summary
Recent studies have shown that body-representations can be altered by dynamic changes in sound. The illusion emerges because of the fusion of visual, tactile and proprioceptive cues - that is, the synchronous stroking changes the proprioceptive and tactile representations of the hand, favouring the match between visual and proprioceptive information, leading to the feeling that the (rubber) hand I am seeing is my own Evidence that this illusion is driven by visual input but is rather a genuine multisensory phenomenon comes from studies that have observed that the illusion occurs in the absence of visual feedback, such as in the ‘somatic’ version of the illusion[7,8]. Follow-up studies with this paradigm provided evidence that consciously perceived changes in arm-representation can be evoked by the manipulated tapping sounds that relate to the changes in perceived tactile distance[24] These studies showed that such sound alterations can lead to performing reaching actions as if one’s arm was longer[25]
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