Hands help hearing: facilitatory audiotactile interaction at low sound-intensity levels.
Auditory and vibrotactile stimuli share similar temporal patterns. A psychophysical experiment was performed to test whether this similarity would lead into an intermodal bias in perception of sound intensity. Nine normal-hearing subjects performed a loudness-matching task of faint tones, adjusting the probe tone to sound equally loud as a reference tone. The task was performed both when the subjects were touching and when they were not touching a tube that vibrated simultaneously with the probe tone. The subjects chose on average 12% lower intensities (p < 0.01) for the probe tone when they touched the tube, suggesting facilitatory interaction between auditory and tactile senses in normal-hearing subjects.
Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, FIN-02015 HUT Espoo, Finland. martins@neuro.hut.fi
Martin
M
Schürmann
Gina
G
Caetano
Veikko
V
Jousmäki
Riitta
R
Hari
D000328:Adult; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception; D008297:Male; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D014110:Touch; D014732:Vibration