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Haptic feedback attenuates illusory bias in pantomime-grasping: evidence for a visuo-haptic calibration

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Abstract

Relative visual information has been shown to mediate grasping responses directed to an area previously occupied by a target object (i.e., pantomime-grasping) and is an information type functionally distinct from the absolute visual information supporting naturalistic grasping (i.e., grasping a physical target). Pantomime- and naturalistic grasps differ not only in terms of their visual properties, but also because the former lacks physical interaction with a target object (i.e., no-haptic feedback). The absence of haptic feedback may represent a reason why pantomime- and naturalistic grasps differ. To address this issue, participants completed pantomime-grasps to objects embedded in fins-in and fins-out configurations of the Müller–Lyer (ML) illusion following a 2000-ms visual delay when haptic feedback was unavailable (H− condition), and when experimentally induced (H+ condition). In particular, in the H+ condition the experimenter placed a physical target object between participants’ thumb and forefinger after they completed their grasping response. H− and H+ conditions were performed when online vision was available (i.e., Experiment 1) and when withdrawn (i.e., Experiment 2). If haptic feedback influences grasping, then the absolute information afforded from physically touching a target object (i.e., the H+ condition) should result in aperture metrics that are refractory—or attenuated—to the relative properties of the ML figures. Grip apertures in H− and H+ conditions were “tricked” in a direction consistent with the perceptual effects of the ML illusion; however, Experiment 2 showed that illusory effects were attenuated in the H+ condition. In other words, responses without online vision showed evidence of a visuo-haptic calibration. These results provide convergent evidence that haptic and visual feedback play a salient role in considering the extant literature’s documented report of kinematic differences between pantomime- and naturalistic grasps.

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Notes

  1. Schenk (2012) did not use the term “pantomime-grasp” to refer to his condition(s) wherein haptic feedback was unavailable. In particular, Schenk referred to his condition wherein H- trials were completed in a separate block as “Grasping without haptic feedback (task 4),” and the condition in which H− and H + trials were interleaved as “Grasping with intermittent haptic feedback (task 5).” The tasks above match the operational definition for remembered target pantomime-grasps provided in the present Introduction. Further, in personal communication Thomas Schenk stated “I would agree that task 4 is a pantomime task, but so is (in my view) task 5.”

  2. Davarpanah Jazi and Heath (2016) showed that H+ trials performed in a blocked—but not random—feedback schedule adhered to Weber’s law. It was proposed that trial-to-trial knowledge of haptic feedback availability serves as the optimal environment to support a visuo-haptic calibration.

  3. For consistency, we present t tests for our between-experiment comparisons. Notably, however, Fig. 3 presents means and 95% between-participant confidence intervals and therefore provides a graphical basis for determining reliable between-experiment differences. For example, in the H− condition (and also the H+ condition) the absence of overlap between Experiments 1 and 2 error bars demonstrates that the magnitude of the illusory effect was reliably larger in the latter experiment (for review of graphical analyses see Cumming 2013).

  4. Some work has proposed that a corrected illusion effect accounting for condition-based differences in physical response functions (i.e., the physical change in the size of a target object) is necessary to determine illusion effects in reaching and grasping (e.g., Hesse et al. 2016). For comparison with other work, Table 3 presents the mean corrected illusion effects for H− and H+ conditions for Experiments 1 and 2 and presents the correlation coefficient for H− and H+ condition corrected illusion effects.

  5. Two different target object sizes (50 and 70 mm) were used in Experiments 1 and 2, and they were randomly presented on a trial-by-trial basis. The random presentation was used so that in the H+ condition participants did not simply rely on haptic feedback provided on trial N–1 to specify grip aperture on trial N. It is, however, possible that the limited number of target object sizes used here resulted in some “haptic learning” and served to support a visuo-haptic calibration.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Major Academic Development Fund and Faculty Scholar Awards from the University of Western Ontario.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Kinesiology, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada

    Jillian Chan & Matthew Heath

  2. Graduate Program in Neuroscience, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Matthew Heath

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  1. Jillian Chan
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  2. Matthew Heath
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Correspondence to Matthew Heath.

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Chan, J., Heath, M. Haptic feedback attenuates illusory bias in pantomime-grasping: evidence for a visuo-haptic calibration. Exp Brain Res 235, 1041–1051 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4860-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4860-9

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