Reversing time by crossing your hands

Sun, 05/18/2008 - 14:24 - NLN

In 2001, Yamamoto and Kitazawa showed that the perception of temporal order can be reversed when subjects cross their hands. Subjects closed their eyes and had their hands mechanically touched in quick succession (with stimuli separated in time by a variable amount -- from 1500 ms to 0 ms).

Subjects were asked to raise the finger of the hand that was first stimulated. The results showed that subjects were accurate in reporting the temporal order of these stimuli when separated by as little as 70ms -- but when their arms were crossed, subjects showed a tendency to reverse the temporal order when the stimuli were separated by 100 to 200ms.

Subjects were not merely confused due to the arm-crossing, since the responses were unspeeded, since subjects could respond correctly to a single stimulus, and since subjects behaved correctly even with crossed arms when the stimuli were separated by 1500ms.

Read full story at Developing Intelligence.