Even distorted felt size engenders visual-haptic integration
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Even distorted felt size engenders visual-haptic integration Giovanni F. Misceo 1 & Philip A. Wiegand 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Intersensory interactions predicted by the sensory precision hypothesis have been infrequently examined by distorting the reliability of size perception by touch. Consequently, participants were asked to see one size and manually feel another unseen size either with bare fingers or with fingers sleeved in rigid tubes to decrease the precision of touch. Their subsequent visual estimates of the perceived size favored the more precise modality. Experiment 1 (N = 46) varied the intersensory discordance to examine whether the estimate arose from trivial response biases or from perceptual binding effects. Experiment 2 (N = 32) examined the presence of the perceptual effect in the absence of discordant sensory cues. Results favored a perceptual interpretation because the haptic and visual cues merged regardless of the discordance amount only when the stimulation arose from separate sources. The observed interaction between touch imprecision and visual bias is consistent with computational models of optimal perception. Keywords Intersensory integration . Touch perception . Visual perception . Size perception
Introduction When adults simultaneously see an optically distorted size and feel another size of the same object, their estimates of the perceived size tend to be between the separate visual and haptic sizes (Helbig & Ernst, 2007; Hershberger & Misceo, 1996). To predict whether the perceived estimate leans toward either the visual or the haptic cue, Welch and Warren (1980) proposed a modality-precision hypothesis. It holds that the immediate response to discordant intersensory cues favors the more reliable modality. Ernst and Banks (2002) quantified the hypothesis with a computational model that minimizes the variance (i.e., maximizes precision) of the merged estimate to improve veridical performance. Surprisingly, this understanding of intersensory relations has been built mainly on distorting the accuracy and reliability of the visual cue. Rarely has the precision hypothesis been examined when touch is made unreliable and when the separate sources of
* Giovanni F. Misceo [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of The Bahamas, Oakes Field Campus, P.O. Box N-4912, Nassau, New Providence, Bahamas
2
Department of Psychological Sciences, Benedictine College, Atchison, KS, USA
stimulation arise from actual (non-illusory) discordances between the seen size and the felt size. Specifically, the precision hypothesis has been repeatedly supported with procedures that optically distort the seen size (or shape) of an object (Ernst & Banks, 2002; Gepshtein & Banks, 2003; Helbig & Ernst, 2007). For example, Rock and Victor (1964) had participants only once simultaneously feel through a hand-concealing cloth and see through a minifying lens a thin square whose optical size was half its haptic size. They found that participants’ subsequent estimates of t
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