Spatial modulation of multisensory integration of visual and tactile motion : Evidence from the redundancy gain paradigm

抄録

In two experiments, the redundancy gain paradigm (Miller, 1982) was employed to examine whether redundant visual and tactile motion signals are integrated across these two modalities, and how the spatial relationship of visual and tactile signals affects cross-modal integration. A visual motion stimulus and/or a tactile motion stimulus were presented, and participants had to identify the motion direction of stimuli from each modality as quickly as possible. It is well known that faster reaction times are observed for bimodal stimuli than for unimodal stimuli; this facilitation is termed redundancy gain (RG). The present study manipulated the spatial relationship between the visual and tactile motion stimuli to assess reaction time distributions and the magnitude of the RG. Results indicate that visual and tactile motion signals are most effectively integrated when visual and tactile stimuli are presented in the same spatial location.