The brain consistently faces a challenge of whether and how to combine the available information sources to estimate the properties of an object explored by hand. While object perception is an inference process involving multisensory inputs, thermal referral (TR) is an illusion demonstrating how the interaction between thermal and tactile systems can lead to deviations from physical reality—when observers touch three stimulators simultaneously with the middle three fingers of one hand but only the outer two stimulators are heated (or cooled), thermal uniformity is perceived across three fingers. Here, we used TR of warmth to examine the thermal-tactile interaction in object temperature perception. We show that TR is consistent with precision-weighted averaging of thermal sensation across tactile locations. Furthermore, we show that prolonged contact with TR stimulation results in adaptation to the local variations of veridical temperatures instead of the thermal uniformity perceived across three fingers. Our results illuminate the flexibility of processing that underlies thermal-tactile interactions and serve as a basis for thermal display design.

中文翻译：

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物体温度感知中的热触觉集成

大脑始终面临一个挑战，即是否以及如何结合可用的信息源来估计手动探索的对象的属性。虽然物体感知是一个涉及多感官输入的推理过程，但热参考 (TR) 是一种错觉，展示了热系统和触觉系统之间的相互作用如何导致偏离物理现实——当观察者用一只手的三个中间手指同时触摸三个刺激器时但只有外面的两个刺激器被加热（或冷却），三个手指之间的热均匀性被感知。在这里，我们使用温暖的 TR 来检查物体温度感知中的热触觉相互作用。我们表明，TR 与跨触觉位置的热感觉的精确加权平均一致。此外，我们表明，长时间接触 TR 刺激会导致适应真实温度的局部变化，而不是三个手指感知的热均匀性。我们的结果阐明了作为热触觉交互基础的处理灵活性，并作为热显示设计的基础。