Abstract
An input (e.g., airplane takeoff sound) to a sensory modality can mask the percept of another input (e.g., talking voices of neighbors) of the same modality. This perceptual masking effect is evidence that neural responses to different inputs closely interact with each other. While recent studies suggest that close interactions also occur across sensory modalities, crossmodal perceptual masking effect has not yet been reported. Here, we demonstrate that tactile stimulation applied to hand can mask the percept of visual stimuli. This effect did not occur when the auditory stimuli were presented or when the body parts other than hand were stimulated. We also demonstrated that the effect occurred primarily when the tactile and visual information were spatially and temporally consistent. The current findings would indicate that neural signals could closely and directly interact with each other, sufficient to induce the perceptual masking effect, even across sensory modalities.
