Talk by Prof. Dr. Tobias Heed

11 June 2025, by Nicola Kaczmarek

On Wednesday, 11.06.2025, 4:15 pm , Prof. Dr. Tobias Heed (Reach & Touch Lab, Department of Psychology, Paris-Lodron-University Salzburg) will give a talk with the title "Touch, limbs, posture, priors - how the brain relates body and space".

Abstract:

Humans are prone to misinterpreting on which limb a touch has occurred. I will show that participants sometimes assign stimuli on a hand to a foot (and vice versa). In fact, they cannot even reliably tell whether two tactile stimuli occurred on the same limb or not, and these difficulties are evident even when participants have to indicate the touched location with a reach. Our experimental findings are incompatible with the long-standing idea that such errors reflect the automatic computation of a touch's 3D spatial location and suggest, instead, that they reflect categorical errors in assigning touch to a limb based on the limbs' regular (default) location – i.e., a postural prior. I will relate these experimental findings to recent reports about localization abilities on hand-held tools and sketch out some ideas for a theoretical account of tactile coding in both decision and sensorimotor contexts.

Further information about the speaker can be found here: https://ccns.plus.ac.at/labs/reachandtouch/members/tobias_heed/

The event will take place at Mollerstraße 10 (Lecture hall).