Role of vision on haptic length perception

When a human recognize length of an object while exploring it with their index finger, haptic and visual sensation both provide information for estimating the length of the object. The present study examined the contribution of tactile and visual cues to the subjective estimation of object length while the subject’s index finger passively moved. The subjects were tested under two experimental conditions; unimodal condition and noise condition. The results were as follows: (1) multisensory enhancement was not observed when the visual and tactile presented length was congruent; (2) visual cues were weighted more than tactile cues in the bimodal judgements when noise was 50% or less. And tactile cues were weighted more than visual cues when noise was 75% or more. Adding noise to visual stimulus did not decline the performance of length perception. These results suggest that adding noise to visual stimulus contributes to directing attention to either modality but not to weighting senso...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HAPTICS
• Authors: Akinori Kumazaki, Kazunori Terada, Akira Ito
• Keywords: HAPTICS 2007, Tactile Cues, Tactile Presented Length, Virtual Reality, Visual Cues