Multisensory temporal processing in own-body contexts: do bodily-self cues affect visual-tactile temporal perception?

In this thesis, I investigated interactions between own-body contexts and visual tactile temporal processing. Previous findings show that bodily-self cues, indicating that seen body parts are plausibly part of one’s own body, alter the perception of visual-proprioceptive synchrony perception. An interpretation of these findings predicts that other common multisensory combinations associated with own-body contexts, such as visual-tactile events, would be similarly affected by bodily-self cues. In two experiments, I measured the difference in detection of visual-tactile asynchrony between plausible and implausible bodily-self cues. I found no difference in precision of visual-tactile asynchrony detection between plausible and implausible bodily-self contexts in either experiment. In contrast, Bayesian analyses of the current findings provide compelling evidence that bodily-self cues do not increase the precision of visual-tactile asynchrony detection. Rather, these findings suggest that visual-proprioceptive synchrony perception in own-body contexts is a special case of dynamic multisensory processing. The current findings have implications for the direction of future research into own-body perception, and a better understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie multisensory perception in own-body contexts.