Cutaneous rabbit illusion

The illusion is most readily evoked on regions of the body surface that have relatively poor spatial acuity, such as the forearm.

From the moment of its discovery, the cutaneous rabbit illusion piqued the curiosity of researchers, and many experiments investigating the effect have been conducted, most of them on the forearm.

[16] In 2009, researchers of Philips Electronics demonstrated a jacket lined with actuator motors and designed to evoke various tactile sensations while watching a movie.

The device takes advantage of the cutaneous rabbit illusion to reduce the number of actuators needed.

[17] In keeping with the prediction of a Bayesian model, the perceptual attraction between the stimulus points is enhanced when the stimuli are made weaker.

[18] Computational models have been put forward by several authors in an effort to explain the origins of the cutaneous rabbit illusion.

According to this model, brain circuitry encodes the expectation, acquired through sensory experience, that tactile stimuli tend to be stationary or to move only slowly.

The Bayesian model was further developed[24] and shown to replicate the perception of humans to both simple (e.g., two-tap) and more complex (multi-tap) stimulus sequences, such as the 3-tap tau effect and the 15-tap rabbit illusion.

Goldreich (2007)[23] proposed that the cutaneous rabbit illusion and the tau effect both result from the same low-speed prior expectation.

Goldreich (2007)[23] showed that, under conditions of temporal as well as spatial uncertainty, the Bayesian model produces the kappa effect.