Arai Kan, Okajima Katsunori
Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, Kanagawa, Japan.
J Vis. 2009 Oct 22;9(11):19.1-9. doi: 10.1167/9.11.19.
Previous research on the interaction between vision and touch has employed static visual and continuous tactile stimuli, and has shown that two kinds of multimodal interaction effect exist: the averaging effect and the contrast effect. The averaging effect has been used to explain several kinds of stimuli interaction while the contrast effect is associated only with the size-weight illusion (A. Charpentier, 1891). Here, we describe a novel visuotactile interaction using visual motion information that can be explained with the contrast effect. We show that the magnitude of tactile force perception (MTFP) from an impact on the palm is significantly modified by the visual motion information of a virtual collision event. Our collision simulator generates visual stimuli independently from the corresponding tactile stimuli. The results show that visual speed modified MTFP even though the actual contact force remained constant: higher visual pre- and post-collision speeds induced lower tactile force perception. Finally, we propose a quantitative model of MTFP in which MTFP is expressed as a function of the visual velocity difference, suggesting that the gain of the tactile perception in the human brain is altered via MTFP modulation.
以往关于视觉与触觉相互作用的研究采用的是静态视觉和连续触觉刺激，并表明存在两种多模态相互作用效应：平均效应和对比效应。平均效应已被用于解释多种刺激相互作用，而对比效应仅与大小-重量错觉有关（A. 夏庞蒂埃，1891年）。在此，我们描述了一种利用视觉运动信息的新型视觉-触觉相互作用，这种相互作用可用对比效应来解释。我们表明，虚拟碰撞事件的视觉运动信息会显著改变手掌受到冲击时的触觉力感知大小（MTFP）。我们的碰撞模拟器独立于相应的触觉刺激生成视觉刺激。结果表明，即使实际接触力保持不变，视觉速度也会改变MTFP：碰撞前和碰撞后的视觉速度越高，触觉力感知越低。最后，我们提出了一个MTFP的定量模型，其中MTFP被表示为视觉速度差的函数，这表明人脑触觉感知的增益通过MTFP调制而改变。
