Tactile motor attention induces sensory attenuation for sounds

Abstract

A doorbell sounds less loud to us if we ring it ourselves than if someone else pushes the button. Self-produced stimuli appear attenuated to us compared to stimuli generated by others (Weiss et al., 2011). The effect is known as sensory attenuation for external events. Here, we asked whether this effect results from a competition for attentional resources of sensory events. We first tested whether tactile attention is boosted at the time of pushing a button. We presented a button in a virtual reality setup that allowed to manipulate the time of tactile feedback. We found that a tactile impulse was perceived as more intense in the moment the hand pushed the button. In a second experiment, participants pushed a button and estimated the loudness of sounds. We found sensory attenuation for the loudness of the sound only when tactile feedback was provided at the time of reaching the movement goal. In a third experiment, we found that this interaction between a tactile and an auditory event did not occur when the hands remained passive without movement. These data reveal that sensory attenuation for external events occurs because tactile attention is boosted at the time of a button pressing movement, thereby dragging attention from the auditory modality.