Understanding other people's feelings in social interactions depends on the ability to map onto our body the sensory experiences we observed on other people's bodies. It has been shown that the perception of tactile stimuli on the face is improved when concurrently viewing a face being touched. This Visual Remapping of Touch (VRT) is enhanced the…

Three experiments examined perceived absolute distance in a head-mounted display virtual environment (HMD-VE) and a matched real-world environment, as a function of the type and orientation of the distance viewed. In Experiment 1, participants turned and walked, without vision, a distance to match the viewed interval for both egocentric…

The perceived distance between touches on a single skin surface is larger on regions of high tactile sensitivity than those with lower acuity, an effect known as "Weber's illusion". This illusion suggests that tactile size perception involves a representation of the perceived size of body parts preserving characteristics of the somatosensory…

Primary somatosensory maps in the brain represent the body as a discontinuous, fragmented set of two-dimensional (2-D) skin regions. We nevertheless experience our body as a coherent three-dimensional (3-D) volumetric object. The links between these different aspects of body representation, however, remain poorly understood. Perceiving the body's…

We present novel evidence showing that new self-relevant visual associations can affect performance in simple shape recognition tasks. Participants associated labels for themselves, other people, or neutral terms with geometric shapes and then immediately judged whether subsequent label-shape pairings were matched. Across 4 experiments there was a…

The authors describe a new visual illusion first discovered in a natural setting. A cyclist riding beside a pair of sagging chains that connect fence posts appears to move up and down with the chains. In this illusion, a static shape (the chains) affects the perception of a moving shape (the bicycle), and this influence involves assimilation…