16:30 - 18:00
Mon-H9-Talk 3--36
Mon-Talk 3
Room: H9
Chair/s:
Knut Drewing, Didem Katircilar
A comparison of unisensory and multisensory landmark distortions on tactile target localization
Mon-H9-Talk 3-3601
Presented by: Paula Soballa
Paula SoballaChristian FringsPhilip SchmalbrockSimon Merz
Trier University
The localization of targets is influenced by the presence of an additional non-target stimuli, referred to as landmarks. In both the tactile and visual modality, systematic distortions of target localizations elicited by the landmark have been observed, often resulting in a shift towards the landmark. Importantly, previous studies have focused on unisensory presentations of landmark and target. However, everyday experiences often involve the integration of information from multiple sources. Given that information from multiple senses can be integrated to enhance performance in perception tasks, it is hypothesized that a multisensory presentation of landmark and target might improve the performance in a target localization task as well. Therefore, landmark distortions should be reduced in a multisensory compared to a unisensory set-up. In two experiments (each N = 30), tactile or visual targets were presented along with tactile or visual landmarks. Importantly, both experiments showed that tactile targets were less distorted by visual landmarks compared to tactile landmarks. Interestingly, for visual targets, no difference was observed between landmarks from the same or different modalities. These findings underscore that the integration of information from other senses supports tactile perception and suggest that the multisensory integration benefit might be more pronounced for touch than vision.
Keywords: landmark, tactile localization, spatial distortion, multisensory