Research Report Extending visual dominance over touch for input off the body Jessica Hartcher-O'Brien a, b, ⁎ , Carmel Levitan b , Charles Spence b a Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, 72076, Germany b Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental, Psychology, University of Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Accepted 8 September 2010 Available online 17 September 2010 Vision tends to dominate over touch in the majority of experimental situations, particularly when visual information is presented on, or near to, the body. We combined two visual dominance paradigms in order to investigate crossmodal interactions between vision and touch for stimuli on versus off the body: 1) The Colavita visual dominance effect, which has recently been extended to vision and touch, and 2) The rubber hand illusion, which has often been used to probe visuotactile interactions. Specifically, we investigated whether moving a visual stimulus off the participant's body would affect visual dominance, and how this dominance would be mediated by the presence/absence of a rubber hand (given the rubber hand illusion provides a way of extending the representation of one's own body in space). Participants made speeded detection/discrimination responses to a random sequence of visual-only, tactile-only, and visuotactile targets. While participants responded near- perfectly on the unimodal target trials, their performance on the visuotactile target trials was deleteriously affected by the simultaneous presentation of a visual stimulus on (as opposed to away from) their body. In particular, when the visual stimulus was presented to their fingertip, participants failed to respond to far more of the tactile than visual stimuli on bimodal trials. The magnitude of this visual dominance effect decreased significantly when the visual stimulus was moved off the body. When a rubber hand was placed at the off-body location, a similar (albeit reduced) visual dominance effect was observed in both positions. These results therefore suggest that visuotactile interactions are strongest when visual stimuli are presented on a body (no matter whom that body, or body-part, belongs to). Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Visual dominance Multisensory perception Peripersonal space Visuotactile interactions Rubber hand 1. Introduction Vision tends to dominate over touch in the majority of laboratory situations (e.g., Gibson, 1943; Rock and Harris, 1967; Rock and Victor, 1964; Spence and Gallace, 2008), though touch has been shown to dominate over vision under a subset of conditions (e.g., Guest and Spence, 2003; Lederman et al., 1986; see Spence and Gallace, 2008; Warren and Rossano, 1991, for reviews). One recent example of visual dominance that has been likened to the phenomenon of crossmodal extinction in neuropsychological patients is the Colavita visual dominance effect (Egeth and Sager, 1977; Hartcher-O'Brien et al., 2008; Koppen and Spence, 2007a). Colavita originally developed the task that has subsequently come to bear his name, while exploring the dominance (or ‘prepotency’) of vision over audition. In a typical study, the presentation of a visual stimulus was found to extinguish participants' ability to respond to the auditory component of a bimodal target on a BRAIN RESEARCH 1362 (2010) 48 – 55 ⁎ Corresponding author. Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany. Fax: + 49 7071 601 61. E-mail address: jhartcher@tuebingen.mpg.de (J. Hartcher-O'Brien). 0006-8993/$ – see front matter. Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2010.09.036 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/brainres