Cite as:
Wismeijer D A, Gegenfurtner K R, Drewing K, 2011, "Associations between haptic softness cues and visual gloss cues" Perception 40 ECVP Abstract Supplement, page 137

Associations between haptic softness cues and visual gloss cues

D A Wismeijer, K R Gegenfurtner, K Drewing

When naturaly unrelated visual and haptic cues, such as the luminance and the stiffness of an object, are statistically correlated, this leads to the perceptual association of the two cues [Ernst, 2007 Journal of Vision 7(5):7, 1–14]. Here we ask whether such arbitrary correlations influence judgments in each single sense and how this influence depends on the natural relation between a sense and the judged dimension. We artificially correlated haptic compliance cues with visual gloss cues. Observers either judged glossiness (naturally related to vision) or softness (naturally related to haptics). We measured the haptic influence on visual judgments and the visual influence on haptic judgments using 2-IFC tasks: Participants discriminated between two visual stimuli, of which one was coupled with a haptic stimulus (visual judgments), or between two haptic stimuli, of which one was coupled with a visual stimulus. The experiment consisted of a baseline session with uncorrelated visual gloss and haptic compliance cues and a learning and testing phase in which both cues were correlated. Participants, partly, showed associations between the arbitrary cues prior to learning. Learning clearly strengthened the association between the two cues.

These web-based abstracts are provided for ease of seaching and access, but certain aspects (such as as mathematics) may not appear in their optimum form. For the final published version of this abstract, please see
ECVP 2011 Abstract Supplement (complete) size: 2206 Kb

[Publisher's note: The abstracts in this year's ECVP supplement have been published with virtually no copy editing by Pion, thus the standards of grammar and style may not match those of regular Perception articles.]