Multimodal Interactions: Visual-Haptic

Until recently, most textbooks on human perception considered each of the senses (e.g., vision, hearing, touch, olfaction, and taste) in isolation, as if each represented an independent perceptual system. However, in most situations our senses receive correlated information about the same external objects and events, and this information is typically combined by the brain to yield the rich multisensory percepts that fill our everyday lives. This entry highlights one important aspect of multisensory perception, namely, how what we see can influence our perception of haptically explored objects and surfaces. Haptic perception (i.e., tactile perception that involves active, as opposed to passive, touch) provides us with information concerning both the substance (hardness, weight, temperature, texture, etc.) and structural properties (size, shape, and volume) of the objects ...