Authors: Tatjana SeizovaCajic Rita Azzi
Publish Date: 2011/04/28
Volume: 211, Issue: 2, Pages: 169-175
Abstract
Muscle vibration excites muscle spindles and creates illusory movement of a body part in a blindfolded individual It is followed by an aftereffect an illusion of return movement when vibration stops The aftereffect reflects adaptation in the proprioceptive system This adaptation is susceptible to attentional manipulations SeizovaCajic and Azzi in Exp Brain Res 2031213–219 2010 but it is not known whether it is open to crossmodal influences unaided by those manipulations We attempted to answer this question by allowing vision of the vibrated stationary arm We asked our participants n = 20 to retain focus on the feeling of movement They reported any illusory movement during 60s biceps vibration at 90 Hz as well as following its offset when vision of the arm was removed During vibration the proprioceptive movement illusion persisted although the stationary arm was visible but its duration and strength were much reduced in comparison with the novision condition The movement aftereffect experienced in total darkness following vibration offset was also substantially weaker The results show that proprioceptive adaptation is strongly modulated by vision We propose that two processes contribute perceptual crossmodal binding with conflicting vision reduces the proprioceptive movement signal and attentional view of a stationary arm distracts from the proprioceptive movement signal Our finding that during vibration participants felt movement in the arm they could see which was stationary shows that crossmodal binding partially failed This happened because the two percepts were too discrepant However only one—the visual—appeared real and we argue that such an outcome is consistent with general principles of intersensory integration
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