Abstract
We perceive the roughness of an object through our eyes and hands. Many crossmodal studies have reported that there is no clear visuo-tactile interaction in roughness perception using static visual cues. One exception is that the visual observation of task-irrelevant hand movements, not the texture of task-relevant objects, can enhance the performance of tactile roughness discrimination. Our study investigated whether task-irrelevant visual motion without either object roughness or bodily cues can influence tactile roughness perception. Participants were asked to touch abrasive papers while moving their hand laterally and viewing moving or static sine wave gratings without being able to see their hand, and to estimate the roughness magnitude of the tactile stimuli. Moving gratings with a low spatial frequency induced smoother roughness perceptions than static visual stimuli when the visual grating moved in the direction opposite the hand movements. The effects of visual motion did not appear when the visual stimuli had a high spatial frequency or when the participants touched the tactile stimuli passively. These results indicate that simple task-irrelevant visual movement without object roughness or bodily cues can modulate tactile roughness perception with active body movements in a spatial-frequency-selective manner.
Highlights
We perceive the roughness of an object through our eyes and hands
When different roughness information was presented to the visual and tactile modalities, the tactile modality appeared to be dominant over the visual m odality[12,14,15]: Visuo-tactile matching of abrasive papers was more weighed on the tactile than the visual m odality[16] and visual roughness discrimination of fabric stimuli was biased by tactile stimuli, but the reverse was not observed[17]
These findings suggest that tactile roughness information is dominant over visual information, so that visual information has no effect on tactile roughness perception
Summary
We perceive the roughness of an object through our eyes and hands. Many crossmodal studies have reported that there is no clear visuo-tactile interaction in roughness perception using static visual cues. Experiment 1 showed that the presentation of visual motion incongruent with the hand movement induced a smoother roughness estimation than the baseline condition. In Experiment 4, we did not present the reference marker because the participants touched tactile stimuli passively without moving their hands.
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