EXPRESS: Effect of prior haptic object exploration on eye-movements

Interaction with objects typically involves both vision and touch. Understanding how visual and haptic information interact during object exploration is essential to uncovering the mechanisms of multisensory shape perception. We investigated whether haptic exploration influences subsequent eye movements, using a cross-modal shape comparison task. Participants (N = 22) explored 3D replicas of bell peppers either haptically or visually, and subsequently viewed the same or a different object. We tracked eye movements during visual explorations. Comparing uni-modal visual to cross-modal, haptic-to-visual conditions, we found that prior haptic exploration led to significantly shorter fixations, longer and faster saccades as well as larger coverage of the image with fixations during subsequent visual exploration - indicative of a broader, more distributed scanning patterns. These effects suggest that visual saliency is modulated by prior tactile experience, challenging purely unimodal or bottom-up models of attentional guidance.