ArticleeLife2023
Action does not enhance but attenuates predicted touch.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural Evidence for Action-Related Somatosensory Predictions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Motor Prediction Reduces Beta-Band Power and Enhances Cerebellar-Somatosensory Connectivity before Self-Touch to Enable Its Attenuation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Working Memory as a Candidate Mechanism Linking Aging and the Sense of Agency: A Narrative Review.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Vision Fine-Tunes Predictions of Bimanual Self-Touch.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Suppressing Sensation during Action across Species and Sensory Modalities: Predictive and Nonpredictive Mechanisms of Sensory Modulation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Divisive attenuation based on noisy sensorimotor predictions accounts for excess variability in self-touch.Journal of neurophysiology · 2025Article
- Attenuation of Self-Induced Pain in Women With Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and Healthy Controls.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- Excitability Modulations of Somatosensory Perception Do Not Depend on Feedforward Neuronal Population Spikes.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- The extraordinary enigma of ordinary tickle behavior: Why gargalesis still puzzles neuroscience.Science advances · 2025Review
- Predictions of bimanual self-touch determine the temporal tuning of somatosensory perception.iScience · 2025Article
- A neurocognitive pathway for engineering artificial touch.Science advances · 2024Review
- Dynamic changes in somatosensory and cerebellar activity mediate temporal recalibration of self-touch.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Aging exerts a limited influence on the perception of self-generated and externally generated touch.Journal of neurophysiology · 2023Article
- Temporal adaptation of sensory attenuation for self-touch.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- Brief Temporal Perturbations in Somatosensory Reafference Disrupt Perceptual and Neural Attenuation and Increase Supplementary Motor Area-Cerebellar Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Dominant motor control theories propose that the brain predicts and attenuates the somatosensory consequences of actions, referred to as somatosensory attenuation. Support comes from psychophysical and neuroimaging studies showing that touch applied on a passive hand elicits attenuated perceptual and neural responses if it is actively generated by one's other hand, compared to an identical touch from an external origin. However, recent experimental findings have challenged this view by providing psychophysical evidence that the perceived intensity of touch on the passive hand is enhanced if the active hand does not receive touch simultaneously with the passive hand (somatosensory enhancement) and by further attributing attenuation to the double tactile stimulation of the hands upon contact. Here, we directly contrasted the hypotheses of the attenuation and enhancement models regarding how action influences somatosensory perception by manipulating whether the active hand contacts the passive hand. We further assessed somatosensory perception in the absence of any predictive cues in a condition that turned out to be essential for interpreting the experimental findings. In three pre-registered experiments, we demonstrate that action does not enhance the predicted touch (Experiment 1), that the previously reported 'enhancement' effects are driven by the reference condition used (Experiment 2), and that self-generated touch is robustly attenuated regardless of whether the two hands make contact (Experiment 3). Our results provide conclusive evidence that action does not enhance but attenuates predicted touch and prompt a reappraisal of recent experimental findings upon which theoretical frameworks proposing a perceptual enhancement by action prediction are based.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.