The Crossed-Hands Deficit in Tactile Temporal-Order Judgments: The Effect of Training

Several recent studies have shown that judgments of temporal order for tactile stimuli presented to the two hands are greatly affected by crossing the hands. The size of the threshold for judging temporal order may be up to four times larger with the hands crossed as compared to the hands uncrossed. The results from these recent studies suggest that with crossed hands, contrary to many situations involving the integration of tactile and proprioceptive information, subjects have difficulty in adjusting their perception of tactile inputs to correspond with the spatial positions of the hands. In the present study we examined the effect of training in judging temporal order on the size of this crossed-hands deficit—the difference in the thresholds for temporal-order judgments when the hands are crossed and uncrossed. All training procedures produced significant declines in the size of the deficit. With training, the difference between crossed-hands and uncrossed-hands temporal-order thresholds dropped from several hundred milliseconds to as little as 19 ms. A group of percussionists with experience in playing with crossed hands showed the same crossed-hands effects as non-musicians. The results were consistent in showing that the crossed-hands deficit was never completely eliminated but was greatly reduced with training. The implication is that subjects are able to adjust to the crossed-hands posture with modest amounts of training. The results are discussed in terms of the explanations that have been offered for the crossed-hands deficit.