Distinguishable Virtual Haptic Textures to Understand Multisensory Sensation

The perception of natural surfaces involves several senses including vision and touch. Several studies have shown cross-modal interactions between the two modalities. However, the integrative mechanisms underlying this process remain unclear. Therefore, we aim to explore the mechanisms involved in the visuo-tactile perception of textures, namely how tactile and visual information are integrated and merged to generate the subjective perception of textures. But one of the difficulties encountered in haptic studies of real textures is to generate tactile feedback that faithfully reproduces the natural surfaces. To overcome this problem, we selected several texture whose vibrotactile signature were recorded. From these signature, we created a database that will be used in the coming electrophysiological and psychophysical studies. First, we performed a preliminary psychophysical task in which the participants were asked to distinguish pairs of textures based on haptic feedback only. The results showed a success rate of 0.82 +/- 0.04 and thus demonstrated that discrimination of the rendered textures is possible without being trivial. The next step would be to perform a study about how people perceive visuo-tactile textures with co-localised visual and tactile dimensions.