Haptic sensation of a material can be modulated by its visual appearance. A technique that utilizes this visual-haptic interaction is called as pseudo-haptic feedback. Conventional studies have investigated pseudo-haptic feedback in situations, wherein a user manipulated a virtual object using a computer mouse, a force-feedback device, etc. The present study investigated whether and how it was possible to offer pseudo-haptic feedback to a user who manipulated a virtual object using keystrokes. Participants moved a cursor toward a destination by pressing a (...) key. While the cursor was moving, the cursor was temporarily slowed down on a square area of the screen. The participants’ task was to report, on a five-point scale, how much resistance they felt to the cursor’s movement. In addition to the basic speed of the cursor, the ratio of the basic speed to the speed within the square area was varied. In Experiment 1, we found that these two factors interacted significantly with each other, but further analysis showed that the cursor speed within the square area was the most important determinant of perceived resistance. In Experiment 2, consistent with the results of the previous experiment, it was found that the cursor movement outside of the square area was not required to generate the sense of resistance. Counterintuitively, in Experiment 3, the sense of resistance was apparent even without user’s keystrokes. We discuss how the sense of resistance for a cursor moved by keystrokes can be triggered visually, but interpreted by the brain as a haptic impression. (shrink)

In a study concerning visual body part recognition, a “self-advantage” effect, whereby self-related body stimuli are processed faster and more accurately than other-related body stimuli, was revealed, and the emergence of this effect is assumed to be tightly linked to implicit motor simulation, which is activated when performing a hand laterality judgment task in which hand ownership is not explicitly required. Here, we ran two visual hand recognition tasks, namely, a hand laterality judgment task and a self-other discrimination task, to (...) investigate whether the self-advantage emerged even if implicit motor imagery was assumed to be working less efficiently and how individual traits [such as autistic traits and the extent of positive self-body image, as assessed via the Autism Spectrum Quotient and the Body Appreciation Scale-2, respectively] modulate performance in these hand recognition tasks. Participants were presented with hand images in two orientations [i.e., upright and upside-down ] and asked to judge whether it was a left or right hand. They were also asked to determine whether it was their own, or another person’s hand. Data collected from men and women were analyzed separately. The self-advantage effect in the hand laterality judgment task was not revealed, suggesting that only two orientation conditions are not enough to trigger this motor simulation. Furthermore, the men’s group showed a significant positive correlation between AQ scores and reaction times in the laterality judgment task, while the women’s group showed a significant negative correlation between AQ scores and differences in RTs and a significant positive correlation between BAS-2 scores and dprime in the self-other discrimination task. These results suggest that men and women differentially adopt specific strategies and/or execution processes for implicit and explicit hand recognition tasks. (shrink)