Spatial attention modulates tactile change detection
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Spatial attention modulates tactile change detection Lore Van Hulle • Stefaan Van Damme • Charles Spence • Geert Crombez • Alberto Gallace
Received: 6 July 2012 / Accepted: 12 October 2012 / Published online: 30 October 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Abstract People often fail to detect changes between successively presented tactile patterns, a phenomenon known as tactile change blindness. In this study, we investigated whether changes introduced to tactile patterns are detected better when a participant’s attention is focused on the location where the change occurs. Across two experiments, participants (N = 55) were instructed to detect changes between two consecutively presented tactile patterns. In half of the trials, the stimulated body sites in the two patterns were identical. In the other half of the trials, one of the stimulated body locations differed between the two patterns. Endogenous (or voluntary) attention was manipulated by instructing participants which new bodily location was most likely to be stimulated. We found that changes at the attended location were detected more accurately than changes at bodily locations that were unattended. This finding demonstrates that attention can effectively modulate tactile change detection. We discuss the value of this experimental paradigm for investigating excessive attentional focus or hypervigilance to particular regions of the body in various clinical populations.
L. Van Hulle (&) S. Van Damme G. Crombez Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] C. Spence Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, Oxford, UK A. Gallace Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Keywords Change detection Tactile perception Spatial attention Hypervigilance
Introduction In daily life, a wide variety of information is presented to our tactile receptors, such as the contact between our back and the chair that we happen to be sitting on, the wooden desk on our skin while we are working, or the clothing that we wear (Graziano et al. 2002). A remarkable observation is that even when tactile information is changing (thus becoming potentially relevant), we can still be unaware of it (Gallace and Spence 2008). Empirical support for this notion mainly comes from research using a tactile change detection paradigm (Gallace et al. 2006b). In a prototypical experiment, participants are repeatedly presented with two successive tactile patterns consisting of the simultaneous presentation of several tactile stimuli on different body sites (see Fig. 1). In half of the trials, the stimulated body sites in the two tactile patterns are identical. In the other half of the trials, one of the stimulated body locations differs between the two tactile patterns. After each trial, participants have to judge whether the locations that were stimulated in the two patterns were the same or
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