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Published on: April 16, 2014
The role of visuohaptic experience in visually perceived depth.
Yun-Xian Ho1, Sascha Serwe, Julia Trommershäuser
1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Journal of Neurophysiology
|April 10, 2009
Summary
Touch can mislead vision, making people rely on false visual cues like shadows. This study shows haptic training can increase reliance on these misleading cues, impacting depth perception.
Area of Science:
- Perception science
- Cognitive psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Haptic input can calibrate visual cues for accurate world property estimation.
- Previous research shows visual judgments of surface roughness are influenced by shadow salience.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if haptic input can "miseducate" vision, leading to reliance on misleading visual cues.
- To determine if visuohaptic training can alter the weighting of visual cues in depth perception.
Main Methods:
- Human subjects visually judged the depth of cylindrical bumps under varying lighting conditions.
- Subjects underwent visuohaptic training, correlating haptic feedback with shadow size (pseudocue) and decorrelating it with disparity and texture.
- Post-training visual judgments were compared to baseline.
Main Results:
- Observers consistently judged bumps with more salient shadows to have greater depth.
- Visuohaptic training led to integration of haptic cues in almost all observers.
- For 5 out of 12 observers, training significantly increased reliance on shadow cues, reducing visual depth estimation accuracy.
Conclusions:
- Haptic information can be integrated and used to reweight visual cues.
- This reweighting can lead to increased reliance on misleading visual cues (pseudocues) even when more reliable visual information is present.
- The findings demonstrate the malleability of visual perception through cross-modal training.
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