When touch leads vision: flexible sensory leadership during active texture exploration
- 1Bournemouth University
Abstract
Vision can sample objects remotely and over a broad field, whereas touch is restricted to contacted skin and is often spatially serial however might outperform vision in resolution by transforming spatial information to a temporal code. This raises the question on how multisensory exploration is coordinated. We recorded gaze and or touch location in exploration of 60 three-dimensional surfaces with locally varying textures during visual, haptic and bimodal exploration while participants performed a same/different task, judging whether a second texture matched the first. In bimodal exploration, gaze and touch became more spatially similar than during unimodal exploration, while touch changed less than vision between unimodal and bimodal contexts. A temporal overlap analysis further showed that touch preceded gaze on average during the first 5 s of bimodal exploration. We then increased visual discriminability of the textures using cast-shadow illumination. A psychophysical pilot confirmed improved texture discrimination, and a new participant group showed a strong shift towards vision-leading exploration. Thus, sensory leadership during active visuo-haptic exploration is not fixed: touch can lead vision when texture information is important, but the balance adapts when visual information becomes more diagnostic.
Related
- A Computer Vision-Based Framework for Multilevel Egg Fertility Classification Using L*a*b* Color Segmentation, Wavelet Texture Features, and Support Vector Machine
- Flexible compression of sensory evidence makes human decisions more resilient to noisy neural computations
- Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision
- How Institutional Distrust Breeds One-Sided Leadership: A Consistency-Based Account
- Attachment-Informed Leadership (AIL): A New Leadership Framework based on Attachment Theory and Social Neuroscience
BibTeX
@misc{ahmadi2026when,
title = {{When touch leads vision: flexible sensory leadership during active texture exploration}},
author = {V. Arab Ahmadi and S. Nasseri-Moghaddam and M. Toscani and A. Metzger},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.31.763287},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.31.763287v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - When touch leads vision: flexible sensory leadership during active texture exploration
AU - V. Arab Ahmadi
AU - S. Nasseri-Moghaddam
AU - M. Toscani
AU - A. Metzger
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/31
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.31.763287
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.31.763287v1
AB - Vision can sample objects remotely and over a broad field, whereas touch is restricted to contacted skin and is often spatially serial however might outperform vision in resolution by transforming spatial information to a temporal code. This raises the question on how multisensory exploration is coordinated. We recorded gaze and or touch location in exploration of 60 three-dimensional surfaces with locally varying textures during visual, haptic and bimodal exploration while participants performed a same/different task, judging whether a second texture matched the first. In bimodal exploration, gaze and touch became more spatially similar than during unimodal exploration, while touch changed less than vision between unimodal and bimodal contexts. A temporal overlap analysis further showed that touch preceded gaze on average during the first 5 s of bimodal exploration. We then increased visual discriminability of the textures using cast-shadow illumination. A psychophysical pilot confirmed improved texture discrimination, and a new participant group showed a strong shift towards vision-leading exploration. Thus, sensory leadership during active visuo-haptic exploration is not fixed: touch can lead vision when texture information is important, but the balance adapts when visual information becomes more diagnostic.
ER -