Phantom Sensation: When the phantom escapes the bounds of the actuators and the end-point is sensed in the air

Abstract

The Phantom Sensation is a case of spatiotemporal interaction. In this paper, we study the influence of the duration of a stimulation on the position of the perceived end-point of the illusion. We find that the position of the end-point is highly dependent on the duration of the stimulation. Three experiments have been conducted. Participants held an object delivering phantom sensations of different durations. We show that for durations ranging from 0.25 to 2.5s, the direction of the illusory motion is well perceived (experiment 1). We secondly show that for increased durations (> 0.75s), the perceived endpoint of the illusion can be located outside of the hand, inside the object held (experiment 2). We finally show that for increased durations (> 1.5s), the perceived end-point can be located even further, outside of the object held, i.e. beyond the intra-actuator space (experiment 3).