Cross-Modal Interactions Between Vision and Touch

Visual cortical areas are closely involved in a variety of tactile tasks. The relative roles of visual imagery and engagement of multisensory representations in such cross-modal recruitment are still unclear. However, the ubiquity of multisensory processing is increasingly appreciated, as is the multifaceted nature of interactions between visual and somatosensory representations of external objects and of the body. Visual deprivation is associated with superior tactile performance and greater cross-modal activity in the visual cortex, although it has been difficult to dissect the contribution of linguistic versus sensory processing to such activity.