Continuous vibration-driven virtual tactile motion perception across fingertips

Abstract

Motion perception is a fundamental function of the tactile system, essential for object exploration and manipulation. While human studies have largely focused on discrete or pulsed stimuli with staggered onsets, many natural tactile signals are continuous and rhythmically patterned. Here, we investigate whether phase differences between simultaneously presented, continuous amplitude-modulated vibrations can induce the perception of motion across fingertips. Participants reliably perceived motion direction at modulation frequencies up to 1Hz, with discrimination performance systematically dependent on the phase lag between vibrations. Critically, trial-level confidence reports revealed the lowest certainty for anti-phase (180{degrees}) conditions, consistent with stimulus ambiguity as predicted by the mathematical framework. I propose two candidate computational mechanisms for tactile motion processing. The first is a conventional cross-correlation computation over the envelopes; The second is a probabilistic model based on the uncertain detection of temporal reference points (e.g., envelope peaks) within threshold-defined windows. This model, despite having only a single parameter (uncertainty width determined by an amplitude discrimination threshold), accounts for both the nonlinear shape and asymmetries of observed psychometric functions. These results demonstrate that the human tactile system can extract directional information from distributed phase-coded signals in the absence of spatial displacement, revealing a motion perception mechanism that parallels arthropod systems yet potentially arises from distinct perceptual constraints.