The Touching Difference: Evidence for Stimulus-Response Binding Effects in Tactile Detection and Localization Performance but Not in Their Visual Counterparts

According to action control theories, responding to stimuli leads to a binding of stimulus and response features into a common representation referred to as an event file. If any component of this event file repeats, information is retrieved and affects performance: While full repetition is beneficial, partial repetition leads to cost. These stimulus-response (S-R) binding effects have been found in very many experimental designs; yet, these effects are typically completely absent in visual detection and localization tasks. Recently, however, it has been found that contrary to vision, auditory detection and localization leads to binding effects, thus suggesting modality dependence. In the current study we aimed to extend this debate by comparing the visual with the tactile domain. Participants detected (Experiment 1) or localized (Experiment 2) visual targets of different color and tactile targets of different intensity and rhythm. In both detection and localization, we observed evidence of binding and retrieval in the tactile domain which was completely absent in the visual domain. The results highlight the previously suggested modality dependence for binding approaches in action control.