Tactile priming accelerates conscious access to continuous flash-suppressed characters.

What is the central question of this study? Research has reported that some sensory input can affect subliminal visual process, such as auditory and olfactory input. However, it is important to address whether tactile input, another form of elementary sensory input, could influence the interocular rivalry process. What is the main finding and its importance? We present several pieces of evidence regarding the influences of familiar tactile shapes and temperature on continuous flash suppression. Our findings provide support for the hypothesis that there is a cross-modal effect on unconscious visual semantic processing of Chinese characters. More specifically, tactile sensations affect subliminal processing of visual information.Tactile and visual sensations are the most vital human functions for obtaining environmental information. However, whether tactile information influences visual processing remains unclear. In this study, a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm was utilized to measure the extent to which tactile sensations facilitate visual processing unconsciously. In Experiment 1, cold and hot temperature finger stimulation served as primers for the words 'cold' and 'hot', which were in turn suppressed by CFS. In Experiment 2, subjects viewed the upright or inverted word 'cell phone' with or without tactile priming of holding a cell phone in their hand. Results demonstrated that the tactile primer significantly shortened the reaction time in the touch group compared to the control group in both experiments. Thus, the tactile sensation of a familiar article and/or temperature appears to facilitate corresponding visual semantic recognition to break CFS earlier. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.