Visual motion information modulates tactile roughness perception

We perceive the roughness of an object through our eyes and hands. Many crossmodal studies have reported that there is no clear visuo-tactile interaction in roughness perception using static visual cues. One exception is that the visual observation of task-irrelevant hand movements, not the texture of task-relevant objects, can enhance the performance of tactile roughness discrimination. Our study investigated whether task-irrelevant visual motion without either object roughness or bodily cues can influence tactile roughness perception. Participants were asked to touch abrasive papers while moving their hand laterally and viewing moving or static sine wave gratings without being able to see their hand, and to estimate the roughness magnitude of the tactile stimuli. Moving gratings with a low spatial frequency induced smoother roughness perceptions than static visual stimuli when the visual grating moved in the direction opposite the hand movements. The effects of visual motion did not appear when the visual stimuli had a high spatial frequency or when the participants touched the tactile stimuli passively. These results indicate that simple task-irrelevant visual movement without object roughness or bodily cues can modulate tactile roughness perception with active body movements in a spatial-frequency-selective manner.