September 2021
Volume 21, Issue 9
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2021
The hand is quicker than the eye: Sensitivity to the timing of visual, vibrotactile, and bi-sensory stimulation
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Mercedes B. Villalonga
    Brandeis University
  • Rachel F. Sussman
    Brandeis University
  • Robert Sekuler
    Brandeis University
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  NIGMS Training Grant T32GM132498, The Jay Pepose ’75 Vision Sciences Fellowship
Journal of Vision September 2021, Vol.21, 1924. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.1924
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      Mercedes B. Villalonga, Rachel F. Sussman, Robert Sekuler; The hand is quicker than the eye: Sensitivity to the timing of visual, vibrotactile, and bi-sensory stimulation. Journal of Vision 2021;21(9):1924. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.1924.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Sequences of pulses can reliably communicate temporal information, but are pulses from all modalities equivalent in this regard? For an answer, we examined temporal sensitivity with visual (V) and vibrotactile (T) pulses. In Experiment One, human subjects received sequences of ten V or T pulses. Subjects categorized each sequence as slow (mean = 4 Hz) or fast (mean = 6 Hz). In different conditions, inter-pulse intervals were either fixed (isochronous sequences) or perturbed to different levels by Gaussian temporal-domain noise. Signal detection analysis showed that tactile sensitivity was superior to visual sensitivity, and that for all but the most variable sequences, subjects were biased to label V sequences “fast” more often than T sequences. We hypothesized that this bias arose from vision’s comparatively poorer temporal acuity. In Experiment Two, we used the same stimuli in a gap detection task for a direct measure of temporal acuity. We also included a bi-sensory (VT) condition to test for an effect of bimodal cue combination. On each trial, subjects observed a pair of stimuli from the same modality condition: a single-pulse stimulus, and a double-pulse stimulus whose inter-pulse interval varied from 2-32 ms. Subjects judged which trial interval contained the double-pulse stimulus. Modality-specific gap detection thresholds showed that to successfully discriminate single-pulse from double-pulse stimuli, subjects needed longer intervals between successive V pulses than between T or VT pulses. Gap detection thresholds were similar for T and VT stimuli, suggesting that the vibrotactile component dominated bimodal gap detection. Together, these results suggest that vibrotactile temporal sensitivity is superior to visual temporal sensitivity, and that vision may be relatively limited in its ability to convey rate information reliably.

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