Congruent visuohaptic bimodality improves detection of defects.

Abstract

Quality control is often carried out by humans. They are more accurate than machines at detecting the many possible defects in complex objects. This task is often multisensorial because defects may be found using touch or vision, or both. A recent multisensory processing theory suggests that different sensory modalities have their own independent resources but rely on a central attentional system if these resources are exceeded. Conversely, different sensory modalities may be combined to exploit redundancies and complementarities to improve sensitivity, but information from the different modalities should be identical to produce such an improvement. The present study was conducted in 2020 and was designed to investigate visuohaptic sensitivity with the aim of improving methods for detecting defects. The main result of these experiments is that when participants benefited from both visual and haptic information, they were more accurate at detecting defects than when using only visual or haptic information. This improvement only occurred if the same defect was examined with both modalities. These results should be replicated in expert operators. Our results highlight the strength of multisensoriality because congruency yielded better performances than unimodal conditions and incongruency decreased accuracy but may allow two products to be checked at once. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).