Our new study has been published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. We investigated whether seeing touch actually enhances tactile perception, or instead changes how people make decisions about whether they felt a tactile stimulus.

Across three experiments, participants completed a tactile detection task while viewing a hand being touched, a finger approaching the hand, a red dot, or no visual stimulus. Using signal detection theory, we found that viewing touch consistently made participants more likely to report feeling a tactile stimulus—a liberal shift in decision criterion—but did not consistently improve their actual tactile sensitivity. Interestingly, simply seeing a finger approach the hand was enough to produce this response bias.

Together, these findings suggest that the apparent improvement in tactile detection when viewing touch may not reflect enhanced tactile perception itself. Instead, visual information may influence how we decide whether a tactile sensation is present, highlighting an important distinction between sensory processing and decision-making in tactile perception. Read the paper here.