A three-dimensional spatial characterization of the crossed-hands deficit

To perceive the location of touch in space, we integrate information about skin-location with information about the location of that body part in space. Most research investigating this process of tactile spatial remapping has used the so-called crossed-hands deficit, in which the ability to judge the temporal order of touches on the two hands is impaired when the arms are crossed. This posture induces a conflict between skin-based and tactile external spatial representations, specifically in the left-right dimension. Thus, it is unknown whether touch is affected by posture when spatial relations other than the right-left dimension are available. Here, we tested the extent to which the crossed-hands deficit is a measure of tactile remapping, reflecting tactile encoding in three-dimensional space. Participants judged the temporal order of tactile stimuli presented to crossed and uncrossed hands. The arms were placed at different elevations (up-down dimension; Experiments 1 and 2), or at different distances from the body in the depth plane (close-far dimension; Experiment 3). The crossed-hands deficit was reduced when other sources of spatial information, orthogonal to the left-right dimension (i.e., close-far, up-down), were available. Nonetheless, the deficit persisted in all conditions, even when processing of non-conflicting information in the close-far or up-down dimensions was enough to solve the task. Together, these results demonstrate that the processing underlying the crossed-hands deficit is related to the encoding of tactile localization in three-dimensional space, rather than related uniquely to the cost of processing information in the right-left dimension. Furthermore, the persistence of the crossing effect provides evidence for automatic integration of all available information during the encoding of tactile information.