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Good vibrations? Vibrotactile self-stimulation reveals anticipation of body-related action effects in motor control

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Abstract

Previous research suggests that motor actions are intentionally generated by recollecting their sensory consequences. Whereas this has been shown to apply to visual or auditory consequences in the environment, surprisingly little is known about the contribution of immediate, body-related consequences, such as proprioceptive and tactile reafferences. Here, we report evidence for a contribution of vibrotactile reafferences to action selection by using a response–effect compatibility paradigm. More precisely, anticipating actions to cause spatially incompatible vibrations delayed responding to a small but reliable degree. Whereas this observation suggests functional equivalence of body-related and environment-related reafferences to action control, the future application of the described experimental procedure might reveal functional peculiarities of specific types of sensory consequences in action control.

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Notes

  1. The first explicit distinction of body-related and environment-related effects appeared under the labels of “resident” and “remote” effects (James 1890; cf. Janczyk et al. 2009; Pfister and Kunde 2013). We consider the present wording of body- vs. environment-related effects to be more intuitive, however.

  2. Condition order had a rather pronounced impact on the RT data in this experiment. All reported effects, however, are significant (and slightly more pronounced) when controlling for order by including it as an additional between-subjects factor in the reported ANOVAs.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) to Wilfried Kunde (Ku 1964/2-2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology III, Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Roland Pfister, Markus Janczyk, Marcel Gressmann & Wilfried Kunde

  2. Psychology Department, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164, USA

    Lisa R. Fournier

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  1. Roland Pfister
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  2. Markus Janczyk
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  4. Lisa R. Fournier
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  5. Wilfried Kunde
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Correspondence to Roland Pfister.

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Pfister, R., Janczyk, M., Gressmann, M. et al. Good vibrations? Vibrotactile self-stimulation reveals anticipation of body-related action effects in motor control. Exp Brain Res 232, 847–854 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3796-6

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