Where is My Mouth? Rapid Experience-dependent Plasticity of Perceived Mouth Position in Humans

Several neural and behavioural studies propose that movements of the hand to the mouth are a key motor primitive of the primate sensorimotor system. These studies largely focus on sensorimotor coordination required to reach the mouth with the hand. However, hand-to-mouth movement depends on representing the location of the mouth. We report 5 experiments using a novel dental model illusion (DMI) that investigates the neural representation of mouth position. When participants used their right index finger to touch the teeth of an unseen dental model in synchrony with the experimenter's tactile stimulation of the participant's own teeth, participants felt that the position of their own teeth was shifted towards the dental model and stated that their right index finger was touching their actual teeth. This result replicated across four experiments and provides an oral analogue to the rubber hand illusion. Synchrony between the two tactile motions was necessary condition to elicit DMI (Experiment 3). DMI was moderately affected by manipulating the macrogeometric or microgeometric tactile properties of the dental model, suggesting cognitive images of one's own oral morphology play a modest role (Experiments 4 and 5). Neuropsychological theories often stress that hand-to-mouth movement emerges early in development or may even be innate. Our research suggests that general, bottom-up principles of multisensory plasticity suffice to provide spatial representation of the egocentric core, including mouth position.