Abstract
BackgroundMost research on the roles of auditory information and its interaction with vision has focused on perceptual performance. Little is known on the effects of sound cues on visually-guided hand movements.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe recorded the sound produced by the fingers upon contact as participants grasped stimulus objects which were covered with different materials. Then, in a further session the pre-recorded contact sounds were delivered to participants via headphones before or following the initiation of reach-to-grasp movements towards the stimulus objects. Reach-to-grasp movement kinematics were measured under the following conditions: (i) congruent, in which the presented contact sound and the contact sound elicited by the to-be-grasped stimulus corresponded; (ii) incongruent, in which the presented contact sound was different to that generated by the stimulus upon contact; (iii) control, in which a synthetic sound, not associated with a real event, was presented. Facilitation effects were found for congruent trials; interference effects were found for incongruent trials. In a second experiment, the upper and the lower parts of the stimulus were covered with different materials. The presented sound was always congruent with the material covering either the upper or the lower half of the stimulus. Participants consistently placed their fingers on the half of the stimulus that corresponded to the presented contact sound.Conclusions/SignificanceAltogether these findings offer a substantial contribution to the current debate about the type of object representations elicited by auditory stimuli and on the multisensory nature of the sensorimotor transformations underlying action.
Highlights
Reaching and grasping movements are among the most common actions we perform in our everyday lives
We recorded the sound produced by the fingers when they make contact with objects covered with different materials, and we presented one of the recorded contact sounds to participants at different times before and after the participants initiated a reach towards a visual object
No significant main effects were observed for the factors sound delivery time, interval, and type of sound for Reaction time (RT) and kinematic variables associated with the first phase of the action (i.e., time at which maximum peak velocity (TPV), TGA; ps.0.05)
Summary
Reaching and grasping movements are among the most common actions we perform in our everyday lives To perform these actions, different sensory modalities are used in concert to perceive and interact with multimodally specified objects and events. Crossmodal links between haptic information and visuomotor control, when reaching to grasp a visual target, have been reported in published experiments [1,2,3]. Participants in these experiments reached and grasped a visual target, a sphere of variable size, with one hand, while holding an unseen distractor, a sphere of a different size, in the other hand. Little is known on the effects of sound cues on visually-guided hand movements
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