Reliability of the Crossed-Hands Deficit in Tactile Temporal Order Judgements

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human Factors

Background:

• Crossing hands over the body's midline impairs tactile temporal order judgement (TOJ), creating a crossed-hands deficit.
• This deficit arises from conflicting internal (somatotopic) and external (spatial) reference frames used to process stimulus location.
• Individual differences in reference frame reliance are significant, with potential implications for understanding conditions like eating disorders.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish the reliability of the tactile TOJ task for assessing individual differences in reference frame usage.
• To determine if the crossed-hands deficit is a reliable measure across different experimental settings and time intervals.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Assessed the reliability of the tactile TOJ task by re-administering it to participants one week apart.
• Experiment 2: Evaluated split-half reliability using data from multiple published and unpublished experiments.

Main Results:

• The tactile TOJ task demonstrated high reliability in measuring the crossed-hands deficit across sessions.
• Split-half reliability was consistently high across various experiments, with larger deficits showing even greater reliability.
• The task's reliability is suitable for exploring individual variations in reference frame weighting.

Conclusions:

• The tactile TOJ task is a reliable tool for investigating individual differences in the use of internal and external reference frames.
• Researchers aiming to study these differences should prioritize maximizing the crossed-hands deficit effect size for optimal results.
• The findings support the use of this task in future research on spatial cognition and individual variability.