RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Action enhances predicted touch
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.03.26.007559
DO 10.1101/2020.03.26.007559
A1 Thomas, Emily R.
A1 Yon, Daniel
A1 de Lange, Floris P.
A1 Press, Clare
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/03/26/2020.03.26.007559.abstract
AB It is widely believed that predicted action outcomes are perceptually attenuated. The present experiments determined whether predictive mechanisms in fact generate attenuation, or instead enhance perception – via neural ‘sharpening’ mechanisms assumed to operate in sensory cognition domains outside of action. We manipulated probabilistic expectations in a force judgement task. Participants produced actions and rated the intensity of concurrent tactile forces. Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings that action outcomes are perceived less intensely than similar passive stimulation, but demonstrated more intense perception when reducing the contribution of non-predictive gating processes. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated prediction explicitly and found that expected outcomes are perceived more, not less, intensely than unexpected outcomes. These findings challenge a central tenet of prominent motor control theories and demonstrate that sensorimotor prediction operates via qualitatively similar mechanisms to other prediction and regardless of the sensory domain.