Tactile stimulation can suppress visual perception

Abstract

An input (e.g., airplane takeoff sound) to a sensory modality can suppress the percept of another input (e.g., talking voices of neighbors) of the same modality. This perceptual suppression effect is evidence that neural responses to different inputs closely interact with each other in the brain. While recent studies suggest that close interactions also occur across sensory modalities, crossmodal perceptual suppression effect has not yet been reported. Here, we demonstrate that tactile stimulation can suppress the percept of visual stimuli: Visual orientation discrimination performance was degraded when a tactile vibration was applied to the observer's index finger of hands. We also demonstrated that this tactile suppression effect on visual perception occurred primarily when the tactile and visual information were spatially and temporally consistent. The current findings would indicate that neural signals could closely and directly interact with each other, sufficient to induce the perceptual suppression effect, even across sensory modalities.

Neural mechanisms underlying touch-induced visual perceptual suppression: An fMRI study

“…Recently, tactile suppressive effects on visual perception were also reported (touch-induced visual suppression; TIVS)20. This study showed that a tactile vibration degraded orientation discrimination performance for visual stimuli.…”

“…In the next main session, we presented the targets for each participant with the estimated spatial frequency value at the left or right of the fixation point. After 50 ms, a vibration (200 Hz sinusoidal burst) was applied to the participants’ left index finger for 200 ms in order to effectively induce TIVS20. The participants were asked to make visual orientation judgments while ignoring the tactile stimulus.…”

“…In the present study, we introduced an experimental setting where tactile and visual stimuli were presented as spatially and temporally congruent so that TIVS20 could occur and investigated the neural changes related to the effect of tactile stimulation on visual perception using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. We measured behavioral performances prior to brain imaging and then estimated neural changes without any task.…”

“…We presented visual and tactile stimuli on the same (congruent in space) or opposite (incongruent in space) side of the space. The spatial congruency aspects enabled us to highlight the differences in neural responses between the conditions where visuo-tactile interactions could or could not occur20 wherein the visuo-tactile stimuli were presented in both conditions. We also introduced the condition in which no tactile stimuli were presented in order to highlight the effect of tactile presentation and visuo-tactile interactions.…”

“…Based on aspects inherent to the TIVS phenomenon2021 and the finding regarding neural changes related to tactile presentations1112, we could predict that inhibitory responses occurred in some visual cortices, and that inhibitory modulations from somatosensory cortical areas and/or through lower subcortical structures or higher sensory association cortices would be involved in the inhibitory neural responses in visual cortical areas.…”