When touch leads vision: flexible sensory leadership during active texture exploration

During visuo-haptic texture exploration of 60 three-dimensional surfaces, touch precedes gaze on average in the first 5 s, and sensory leadership shifts toward vision when visual discriminability is increased.

• Why it matters: Vision and touch differ in how they sample space, so it is unclear how the brain coordinates them during active texture matching, especially when one modality becomes more informative.
• What they did: Participants explored 60 textured 3D surfaces under visual, haptic, and bimodal conditions while recording gaze and touch location during a same/different texture task; bimodal timing was analyzed for temporal overlap, and visual discriminability was increased with cast-shadow illumination.
• The result: In bimodal exploration, gaze and touch became more spatially similar than in unimodal exploration, touch changed less than vision, and increased visual discriminability produced a strong shift toward vision-leading exploration.

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