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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Testing Tactile Masking between the Forearms

Testing Tactile Masking between the Forearms

Published on: February 10, 2016

When in Doubt, Touch Is More Convincing Than Vision.

Merle T Fairhurst^1,2, Eoin Travers³, Isabelle Ripp⁴

¹Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI), Faculty of Electrical and Computer-Engineering, 9169Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.

Multisensory Research

|March 31, 2026

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

People often touch objects after seeing them. This study reveals a bias towards using touch when visual and tactile information is ambiguous, even if touch offers no accuracy advantage.

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Published on: April 21, 2023

Area of Science:

Psychology
Neuroscience
Perception

Background:

Humans often feel compelled to touch objects after visual inspection.
The reasons for this behavior are debated: enhanced accuracy or increased trust in touch.
The Vertical-Horizontal illusion, where vertical lines are overestimated, was adapted to create ambiguous stimuli for both vision and touch.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether touch provides superior information or is simply trusted more than vision.
To explore sensory biases in perception, particularly when stimuli are ambiguous.
To determine if touch is preferentially used in situations of perceptual uncertainty.

Main Methods:

Participants engaged in bimodal (vision and touch) experiments involving a modified Vertical-Horizontal illusion.
Two experiments were conducted: forced resampling (modality chosen by experimenter) and free resampling (participant choice).
Judgments of bar length and confidence ratings were collected before and after resampling, with varying degrees of stimulus ambiguity.

Main Results:

Resampling did not significantly improve overall accuracy in judging bar length.
Participants were more likely to change their judgment when resampling by touch.
In ambiguous conditions, participants increasingly preferred touch for reinspection and were more prone to change their minds.

Conclusions:

Neither vision nor touch offered a consistent accuracy advantage in this task.
A selective bias towards using touch emerges under conditions of perceptual ambiguity.
This bias towards touch occurs even when it does not provide objective benefits over vision.