Where do people feel a touch when their hand is not where they see it? In the classic rubber hand illusion, people feel touch on the seen rubber hand when it is brushed in synchrony with their unseen actual hand. But does the actual hand still influence tactile perception?
Using the mirror box illusion, we found that when there was spatial mismatch between visual and proprioceptive information of hand position, the perceived location of tactile stimuli on the skin surface was systematically biased toward the proprioceptively-defined hand position compared to baseline. These results provide evidence that the actual hand position exerts influence on tactile localization, adding to past findings that information from external space affects tactile localization in somatotopic space. You can read it here.