Title:Speed Matching Interaction between Visual and Tactile Motion
VOLUME: 3 ISSUE: 1
Author(s):Liancun Zhang, Jiajia Yang, Yinghua Yu, Satoshi Takahashi, Yuta Araki, Qiang Huang and Jinglong Wu
Affiliation:Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama 700-8530, Japan.
Keywords:Crossmodal, speed matching, tactile speed, unimodal, visual speed.
Abstract:The goal of the present study is to explore the speed discrimination interaction between
visual and tactile motion during unimodal tasks and crossmodal tasks. Fifteen participants performed
four speed reproduction tasks that included a tactile-tactile task, a visual-visual task, a tactile-visual
task and a visual-tactile task at various speeds. Participants were asked to remember the standard
stimuli speed and match the stimuli speed with the standard stimuli speed. The present study showed that both visual discrimination
speed and tactile visual discrimination are underestimated relative to the standard speed at relatively high
speeds during unimodal tasks. The present study suggests that speed matching is processed similarly in both the visual and
tactile sensory systems. Moreover, the present study demonstrated reciprocal interactions between the processing of visual
speed matching and tactile speed matching. Visual speed stimuli positively affected tactile speed matching, whereas tactile
speed stimuli disrupted visual speed matching at relatively high speeds. Interestingly, visual speed stimuli can calibrate
the tactile speed discrimination, but not vice-versa. A possible explanation is that the perceptual system is organized
such that speed stimuli input from visual modalities receive a higher weight in the interaction process than speed stimuli input
from tactile modalities. The reciprocal interactions between visual and tactile speed matching modalities directly support the
view that at some point in the motion processing stream, these two modalities have partially overlapping substrates.
