The left–right reversed visual feedback of the hand affects multisensory interaction within peripersonal space

Abstract

The interaction between vision and touch, known as the crossmodal congruency effect, has been extensively investigated in several research studies. Recent studies have revealed that the crossmodal congruency effect involves body representations. However, it is unclear how bodily information (e.g., location, posture, motion) is linked to visual and tactile inputs. Three experiments were conducted to investigate this issue. In Experiment 1, participants performed a crossmodal congruency task in which both their hand appearance and the motor trajectories were left–right reversed. The results showed that the crossmodal congruency effect was not observed in the reversal condition, whereas participants showed significant crossmodal congruency in the control condition, in which there was no visual manipulation of the hand. In Experiments 2 and 3, where either the hand appearance or motor trajectory was left–right reversed individually, a significant crossmodal congruency effect was observed. This study demonstrated that visual manipulation of hand appearance and motor trajectories both affected the crossmodal congruency effect, although neither showed a dominant effect that solely altered the crossmodal congruency effect. The present results provide insights into the relationship between visual-tactile interactions and bodily information.