Fig. 1: Experimental design and set-up.
From: Mothers are more egocentric towards their own child’s bodily feelings
a Experimental design. Valence of the fabric touching the self and the other being either pleasant/unpleasant and congruent/incongruent. Dyads of participants are tested in proximal space using a set-up (box closed on the top but open on the other participant’s side) that allows tactile stimulation of participant’s unseen arm at the same time as they are watching another participant’s opposite arm being touched synchronously, allowing a concurrent, unisensory experience of self (tactile only) and other (vision only). These experiences can either be congruent or incongruent in pleasantness (pleasant or unpleasant), and unlike previous studies that have used affective images during congruent stimulation, both participants are seeing the other being touched directly on the body, as they are feeling touch in the corresponding body part. b Procedure. Prior to the simultaneous touch conditions, we tested unisensory (non-concurrent) perception for both the felt touch on the self and the seeing touch on the other, to get a measure of unisensory priors in participants (Prior estimates). Then, during the main task participants had to judge how pleasant was the touch they felt (self) or saw (other), without knowing in advance which question they will have to answer, so they had to focus on both self and other’s experience. c Experimental set-up for Experiment 1a and 1b. with a pictorial representation of the set-up with two participants separated by a curtain. d Experiment 2 experimental set-up, enabling two Mother-Child dyads to receive separate but simultaneous tactile stimulation to their concealed forearm whilst observing tactile stimulation upon their partner.
