See what you've done! Active touch affects the number of perceived visual objects

Abstract

Previous research has shown that visual perception is affected by sensory information from other modalities. For example, sound can alter the visual intensity or the number of visual objects perceived. However, when touch and vision are combined, vision normally dominates--a phenomenon known as visual capture. Here we report a cross-modal interaction between active touch and vision: The perceived number of brief visual events (flashes) is affected by the number of concurrently performed finger movements (keypresses). This sensorimotor illusion occurred despite little ambiguity in the visual stimuli themselves and depended on a close temporal proximity between movement execution and vision.