Determine whether anticipation explains faster thermal perception under separated pre-stimulation

Determine whether anticipation contributed to the faster thermal perception reported by Sato et al. when a pre-stimulus was separated from the main stimulus by a no-contact interval.

Background

The paper discusses prior work by Sato et al., which reported that spatially distributed warm and cool stimulation enabled faster thermal perception than uniform stimulation for relatively small skin-temperature changes. However, the prior experimental design separated the pre-stimulus from the main stimulus with a no-contact interval. This leaves unresolved whether the reported effect arose from the thermal stimulation itself or from participants anticipating the forthcoming main stimulus.

The authors identify continuous-contact preconditioning as a way to test conscious detectability directly, but the specific contribution of anticipation in the earlier separated-stimulus paradigm remains explicitly unresolved.