Illusory rotations in the haptic perception of moving spheres and planes

Abstract

Recently, we have shown that a translating bar on which blindfolded participants position their hand is perceived as also rotating. Here, we investigated whether such an illusory rotation would also be found if a sphere or a plane (i.e. a stimulus without a clear orientation) was used as translating stimulus.We indeed found similar rotation biases: on average a stimulus that translates over a distance of 60 cm has to rotate 25 ◦ to be perceived as non-rotating. An additional research question was whether the biases were caused by the same underlying biasing egocentric reference frame. To our surprise, the correlations between the sizes of the biases of the individual participants in the various conditions were not high and mostly not even significant. This was possibly due to day-to-day variations, but clearly, more research is needed to answer this second research question.