Experience-dependent visual cue recalibration based on discrepancies between visual and haptic percepts

We studied the hypothesis that observers can recalibrate their visual percepts when visual and haptic (touch) cues are discordant and the haptic information is judged to be reliable. Using a novel visuo-haptic virtual reality environment, we conducted a set of experiments in which subjects interacted with scenes consisting of two fronto-parallel surfaces. Subjects judged the distance between the two surfaces based on two perceptual cues: a visual stereo cue obtained when viewing the scene binocularly and a haptic cue obtained when subjects grasped the two surfaces between their thumb and index fingers. Visual and haptic cues regarding the scene were manipulated independently so that they could either be consistent or inconsistent. Experiment 1 explored the effect of visuo-haptic inconsistencies on depth-from-stereo estimates. Our findings suggest that when stereo and haptic cues are inconsistent, subjects recalibrate their interpretations of the visual stereo cue so that depth-from-stereo percepts are in greater agreement with depth-from-haptic percepts. In Experiment 2 the visuo-haptic discrepancy took a different form when the two surfaces were near the subject than when they were far from the subject. The results indicate that subjects recalibrated their interpretations of the stereo cue in a context-sensitive manner that depended on viewing distance, thereby making them more consistent with depth-from-haptic estimates at all viewing distances. Together these findings suggest that observers' visual and haptic percepts are tightly coupled in the sense that haptic percepts provide a standard to which visual percepts can be recalibrated when the visual percepts are deemed to be erroneous.