University of Bath, Bath, UK.
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Feb;84(2):509-518. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02414-x. Epub 2021 Dec 3.
The material-weight illusion (MWI) demonstrates how our past experience with material and weight can create expectations that influence the perceived heaviness of an object. Here we used mixed-reality to place touch and vision in conflict, to investigate whether the modality through which materials are presented to a lifter could influence the top-down perceptual processes driving the MWI. University students lifted equally-weighted polystyrene, cork and granite cubes whilst viewing computer-generated images of the cubes in virtual reality (VR). This allowed the visual and tactile material cues to be altered, whilst all other object properties were kept constant. Representation of the objects' material in VR was manipulated to create four sensory conditions: visual-tactile matched, visual-tactile mismatched, visual differences only and tactile differences only. A robust MWI was induced across all sensory conditions, whereby the polystyrene object felt heavier than the granite object. The strength of the MWI differed across conditions, with tactile material cues having a stronger influence on perceived heaviness than visual material cues. We discuss how these results suggest a mechanism whereby multisensory integration directly impacts how top-down processes shape perception.
物质重量错觉（MWI）表明，我们过去对物质和重量的经验会产生期望，从而影响对物体重量的感知。在这里，我们使用混合现实技术来使触觉和视觉相互冲突，以研究向举重者呈现材料的方式是否会影响驱动 MWI 的自上而下的感知过程。大学生在虚拟现实（VR）中举起等重的聚苯乙烯、软木和花岗岩方块，同时查看计算机生成的方块图像。这允许改变视觉和触觉材料线索，同时保持所有其他物体属性不变。在 VR 中对物体材料的表示进行了操纵，以创建四种感觉条件：视觉-触觉匹配、视觉-触觉不匹配、仅视觉差异和仅触觉差异。在所有感觉条件下都产生了强烈的 MWI，其中聚苯乙烯物体感觉比花岗岩物体重。MWI 的强度因条件而异，触觉材料线索对感知重量的影响比视觉材料线索更强。我们讨论了这些结果如何表明一种机制，即多感觉整合直接影响自上而下的过程如何塑造感知。
