Cross-Modal Interactions and Movement-Related Tactile Gating: The Role of Vision

When engaging with the environment, multisensory cues interact and are integrated to create a coherent representation of the world around us, a process that has been suggested to be affected by the lack of visual feedback in blind individuals. In addition, the presence of voluntary movement can be responsible for suppressing somatosensory information processed by the cortex, which might lead to a worse encoding of tactile information.

In this work, we aim to explore how cross-modal interaction can be affected by active movements and the role of vision in this process.

To this end, we measured the precision of 18 blind individuals and 18 age-matched sighted controls in a velocity discrimination task. The participants were instructed to detect the faster stimulus between a sequence of two in both passive and active touch conditions. The sensory stimulation could be either just tactile or audio-tactile, where a non-informative sound co-occurred with the tactile stimulation. The measure of precision was obtained by computing the just noticeable difference (JND) of each participant.

The results show worse precision with the audio-tactile sensory stimulation in the active condition for the sighted group (p = 0.046) but not for the blind one (p = 0.513). For blind participants, only the movement itself had an effect.

For sighted individuals, the presence of noise from active touch made them vulnerable to auditory interference. However, the blind group exhibited less sensory interaction, experiencing only the detrimental effect of movement. Our work should be considered when developing next-generation haptic devices.