The Tactile Quartet: Comparing Ambiguous Apparent Motion in Tactile and Visual Stimuli
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the visual quartet, alternating diagonal pairs of dots produce apparent motion horizontally or vertically, depending on proximity. Here, we studied a tactile quartet where vibrating tactors were attached to the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. Apparent motion was felt either within hands (from index finger to thumb) or between hands. Participants adjusted the distance between their hands to find the point where motion changed directions. Surprisingly, switchovers occurred when between-hand distances were as much as twice that of within-hand distances—a general bias that was also found for tactile judgments of static distances. This expansion of within-hand felt distances was again seen when lights were placed on the hands rather than vibrating tactors. Importantly, switchover points were similar when the hands were placed at different depths, indicating that representations governing tactile motion were in perceptual three-dimensional space, not retinal two-dimensional space. This was true whether the quartets were visual stimuli on the hands or were purely visual on a monitor, suggesting that proximity is generally determined in three-dimensional coordinates for motion perception. Finally, the similarity of visual and tactile results suggests a common computation for apparent motion, albeit with different built-in distance biases for separate modalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".