The visual and haptic perception of natural object shape

• Published in: Perception & psychophysics Vol. 66; no. 2; pp. 342 - 351
• Main Authors: NORMAN, J. Farley, NORMAN, Hideko F, CLAYTON, Anna Marie, LIANEKHAMMY, Joann, ZIELKE, Gina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.02.2004
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Form Perception; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Multimodal perception; Perception; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recognition (Psychology); Touch; Visual Perception; Human; Stimulus shape; Tactile sensitivity; Vision; Cognition; Three dimensional space; Space perception; Experimental study; Intermodal perception
• ISSN: 0031-5117; 1532-5962
• DOI: 10.3758/bf03194883

In this study, we evaluated observers' ability to compare naturally shaped three-dimensional (3-D) objects, using their senses of vision and touch. In one experiment, the observers haptically manipulated 1 object and then indicated which of 12 visible objects possessed the same shape. In the second experiment, pairs of objects were presented, and the observers indicated whether their 3-D shape was the same or different. The 2 objects were presented either unimodally (vision-vision or haptic-haptic) or cross-modally (vision-haptic or haptic-vision). In both experiments, the observers were able to compare 3-D shape across modalities with reasonably high levels of accuracy. In Experiment 1, for example, the observers' matching performance rose to 72% correct (chance performance was 8.3%) after five experimental sessions. In Experiment 2, small (but significant) differences in performance were obtained between the unimodal vision-vision condition and the two cross-modal conditions. Taken together, the results suggest that vision and touch have functionally overlapping, but not necessarily equivalent, representations of 3-D shape.