Embodied Precision: Intranasal Oxytocin Modulates Multisensory Integration

What Was Tested

This controlled clinical trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Bodily illusions, such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI) and the size-weight illusion (SWI), allow them to investigate how the brain resolves conflicting multisensory evidence during perceptual inference in relation to different facets of body representation.

Why It Was Studied

In the RHI, synchronous tactile stimulation of a participant's hidden hand and a visible rubber hand creates illusory body ownership; in the SWI, the perceived size of the body can modulate the estimated weight of external objects.

According to Bayesian models, such illusions arise as an attempt to explain the causes of multisensory perception and may reflect the attenuation of somatosensory precision, which is required to resolve perceptual hypotheses about conflicting multisensory input.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 41 volunteers taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are teenagers, young adults and adults, women only.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover.

As a double-blind Oxytocin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Oxytocin group a baseline to be compared against.

Each person switched between Oxytocin and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Illusions, Oxytocin, Size Perception, Touch Perception, Visual Perception and Weight Perception.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study of Oxytocin in 41 volunteers.

The publication is from 2019 (Journal of cognitive neuroscience), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page, all human trials.