Abstract
It is well known that detection of a central Gabor stimulus is modulated by the presence of collinear flanker stimuli. Target detection is facilitated when flanker stimuli are iso-oriented and aligned with the target at adequate spatial separations, suggesting the involvement of lateral interactions in early visual processing. Can such contextual effects of flankers on the target detection occur in a cross-modal setting (a central visual target and tactile flankers)? To address this, I investigated a variant of the lateral flanker paradigm using the visually presented line targets and tactile flanker lines. The results showed that tactile flankers facilitated the detection of visual target when the tactile flankers were collinear with the visual target, indicating the occurrence of cross-modal contextual modulation between vision and touch. The findings suggest that the integration process could occur at a relatively early perceptual processing stage of perceptual grouping.