Auditory-Tactile Interaction in Virtual Environments

The aim of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of the auditory-tactile integration and interaction. In the first part of this work, it is investigated which physical factors and which physical conditions can cause a perceptual segregation of auditory and tactile events. Most investigations dealing with multi-modal segregation (or integration) are related to auditory and visual modalities, while only very few investigations are addressing auditory and tactile interaction. A considerable amount of the auditory-visual integration studies has focused on simultaneity, which is the most powerful cue available for determining whether two inputs have been generated by a single multimodal event or multiple unimodal events. In these studies artificial conflict situations were used in the laboratory and the sensitivity to delays between auditory and visual stimuli was measured. The general findings of these studies are:

- Humans have great tolerance to intersensory asynchrony, and
- They are more sensitive to visual delays than to auditory delays.