The perception of texture is influenced by visual information as well as awareness achieved from foot-sole haptics. Numerous psychophysiological studies have elucidated the effects of visual and haptic information. However, research on the relationship between visual information predicted before a foot sole is placed on the floor and haptic information acquired after stepping on the floor is limited. The existing literature also does not offer any methodology for investigating these effects. This study aimed to build an experimental environment to measure the subjective evaluation (i.e., hardness similarity of visual and haptics stimuli, and comfort) and to examine brain activity by means of fMRI simultaneously when participants were presented with foot-sole haptics stimuli following the projection of visual stimuli. The results revealed a considerable difference in the subjective evaluation of hardness similarity between the visual-haptic similar and dissimilar conditions, which means that we could successfully build the measurement system.
