Namely, the illusion appears only when one touches another person according to the optimal properties of the latter's CT-based affective touch system.
Note that it may take lots of practice to make this illusion appear perfect; the more skilled that you are at performing it, the more likely you'll pull it off successfully.
The social softness illusion appeared during both active touch conditions (individual; t = −3.77; P Bonf = 0.003; joint; t = −2.89; P Bonf = 0.02; Figure 2B; see Supplemental Information for full analysis and overall ANOVA results) but was absent when the skin stroking was passively performed (P Bonf = 0.54).
We further found that this softness illusion appeared selectively when the touch activated a neurophysiological system for affective touch in the receiver.
As we have shown in our experiment, if the behavior intended to prevent infrequent undesired outcomes takes place very often, then the preventive illusion appears, and it is seemingly as strong in magnitude as its generative counterpart.
It should be noted that the magnitude of this expectation-only illusion appears to be somewhat smaller than the classic SWI observed in the full-vision condition.
Some insight into Gardner's ability to entertain such multiplicity can be found in his 1960 introduction to "The Annotated Alice," where he states, "The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.
If so, the model predicted that a sphere should act as a kind of optical illusion, appearing further away than it was.
"Why this particular illusion appears under certain drugs is unknown, but should be addressed by future neuroimaging experiments".
It should be noted that the reason for the discrepancy between the two samples with respect to the detectability of the comparative illusion may be visible in the density curves in Fig. 6: Although the peaks of the illusion conditions appear to be equal in the two samples, the laboratory illusion condition appears to have a slightly heavier right side than the AMT illusion condition.
