An investigation of visuo-haptic integration using a texture discrimination task
Poster Presentation

Jason Chan
Institute of Neuroscience

     Abstract ID Number: 52
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 16, 2005

Abstract
In this study, we investigated the role of visuo-haptic integration using a series of complex stimuli that were discriminable by surface texture only. The visual and haptic stimuli were taken from a continuum of two partially overlapping surfaces each defined by different component texture elements. A continuum referred to the amount of available information in the stimulus that was relevant to the task such that at the midpoint of the continuum the stimuli were ambiguous. The task for the participant was to indicate which of the upper or lower surfaces in a stimulus was overlapping the other. The visual surface stimuli were each composed of lines of different orientations whereas the haptic surface stimuli were each composed of different dot densities. In Experiment 1 the task was conducted entirely within either the visual or haptic modalities. We found that as stimulus ambiguity increased, participants found it more difficult to determine which surface overlapped the other in each modality. In Experiment 2 we examined if whether a combination of the senses could improve performance by resolving the conflict between the ambiguous stimuli. Our initial findings suggest that multisensory integration reduced uncertainty and resulted in improved performance relative to within modal performance.