Investigating Visual Capture and Somatic Fidelity in Conflicting Emotional Cues

As digital interactions increasingly mimic physical reality, the integration of affective haptics becomes essential to mitigate sensory flattening. However, the perceptual hierarchy between vision and touch in emotional decoding remains an open question. In this work, we investigated visual capture and somatic fidelity in a trimodal emotion recognition context. Through a within-subjects experiment utilizing the RAVDESS dataset, we quantified response latency and error rates across congruent and conflicting audio-visual-haptic scenarios. Analysis of the results using linear mixed-effects models revealed a sensory hierarchy: visual cues consistently override haptic feedback. Crucially, our analysis uncovers a temporal asymmetry in error dynamics. Visual capture emerges as an automatic mechanism, in which participants aligned to the visual illusions rapidly and without hesitation. In contrast, correctly identifying haptic targets among visual conflict requires significant cognitive inhibition, manifesting as a measurable delay in processing time. These findings suggest that , within the tested paradigm, bodily-grounded haptic feedback is not sufficient to override visual misconceptions, and that haptic channels may require distinct temporal priming or intensity modulation to effectively compete with the visual system.