Touch can change visual slant perception

The visual system uses several signals to deduce the three- dimensional structure of the environment, including binocular disparity, texture gradients, shading and motion parallax. Although each of these sources of information is independently insufficient to yield reliable three-dimensional structure from everyday scenes, the visual system combines them by weighting the available information; altering the weights would therefore change the perceived structure. We report that haptic feedback (active touch) increases the weight of a consistent surface- slant signal relative to inconsistent signals. Thus, appearance of a subsequently viewed surface is changed: the surface appears slanted in the direction specified by the haptically reinforced signal