Spatial Compatibility of Visual and Tactile Stimulation in Shared Haptic Perception

Tactile sharing with others facilitates improving communications and augmenting cooperative tasks. An increase of persons sharing tactile sensations increases the effectiveness whereas the area of tactile stimuli given should be investigated for intuitive perception. This study investigated the effect of spatial correspondence between tactile and visual stimuli in identifying tactile stimuli. In the experiment, participants viewed simultaneously two videos of other agents' hands each rubbing one of three textures and felt their vibrotactile stimuli in two locations. The videos were presented at different locations on the screen (Scene 1: left-right side or Scene 2 & 3: top-bottom) and the vibrotactile stimuli were presented either at the wrists of the left and right hand (Scene 1) or at the upper arm and the wrist of the right arm which either rested on the table (Scene 2) or was hanging down along the body (Scene 3). For each scene, visual and tactile stimuli were either spatially aligned (left and right video with tactile stimuli at the left and right wrist, and top and bottom video with top and bottom location on the right arm) or not. The result showed shorter response times for left-right spatial correspondence and for far (top) and close (bottom) visual stimuli corresponding to distal (wrist) and proximal (upper arm) locations on the body. This implied that the body schematic is an important factor for spatial compatibility of visual and tactile stimuli.