The spatial relations between stimulus and response determine an absolute visuo-haptic calibration in pantomime-grasping

Pantomime-grasps entail a response to an area adjacent to (i.e., spatially dissociated pantomime-grasp), or previously occupied by (i.e., no-target pantomime-grasp) a target. Previous work has reported that pantomime-grasps differ kinematically from naturalistic grasps (i.e., grasping a physical target object) - a result taken to evince that pantomime-grasps are perception-based and mediated via relative visual information. However, such actions differ not only in terms of their visual properties, but also because the former precludes haptic feedback related to a target's absolute size. The current study provides four experiments examining whether experimenter-induced haptic feedback influences the information mediating spatially dissociated and no-target pantomime-grasps. Just-noticeable-difference scores were computed to determine whether grasps adhered to, or violated, the relative psychophysical properties of Weber's law. Spatially dissociated pantomime-grasps performed with haptic feedback adhered to Weber's law (Experiments 1-3), whereas their no-target pantomime-grasp counterparts violated the law (Experiment 4). Accordingly, we propose that the top-down demands of decoupling stimulus-response relations in spatially dissociated pantomime-grasping renders aperture shaping via a visual percept that is not directly influenced by the integration of haptic feedback. In turn, the decreased top-down demands of no-target pantomime-grasps allows haptic feedback to serve as a reliable sensory resource supporting an absolute visuo-haptic calibration.