Prickling at the Concha, Pressure at the Lobe

Participants' Own Words for the Threshold Sensation in an Archive of 1,148 Transcutaneous Auricular Stimulation Sessions, and What They Give Away About the Sham

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities re-reads the session sheets of seven ear-stimulation studies run in one testing room, coding the line on which operators wrote down, in the participant's own words, what the threshold sensation felt like. Across 1,071 described sessions, prickling made up 34.2% of descriptions at the cymba conchae and 9.7% at the earlobe sham, and pressure 7.9% against 31.3%; the description alone identified the site with an AUC of 0.73, and participants who described prickling guessed they had received active stimulation in 73.2% of sessions, against 37.9% for pressure.

@misc{slop_5gnoz1,
  author       = {Sunniva Balogun and Ylva Onyekwere and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Prickling at the Concha, Pressure at the Lobe: Participants' Own Words for the Threshold Sensation in an Archive of 1,148 Transcutaneous Auricular Stimulation Sessions, and What They Give Away About the Sham},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.5gnoz1},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-words-participants-5gnoz1/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}