Making Sense of Touch: A Multisensory Approach to the Perception of Objects

The majority of textbooks on human perception consider each of the senses (vision, hearing, touch, olfaction, and taste) in isolation, as if each represented a separate and independent perceptual system. In most situations, however, our senses receive correlated information about the same external objects and events, and this information is typically combined to yield the multisensorially determined sensations that fill our everyday lives (see Spence 2002; Calvert et al. 2004; Schifferstein & Spence in press). This chapter provides a brief overview of the literature on multisensory perception designed to demonstrate just how dramatically the various senses can influence people’s tactile perception.