Discussion of the history and utility of organic hourglass inclusions and a recipe for synthesizing a particular system (K2SO4 containing acid fuchsin), the quantification of the dye content, and the observation of its dichroism.

Visual object recognition depends in large part on a domain-general ability (Richler et al. Psychol Rev 126(2): 226-251, 2019). Given evidence pointing towards shared mechanisms for object perception across vision and touch, we ask whether individual differences in haptic and visual object recognition are related. We use existing validated visual tests to estimate visual object recognition ability and relate it to performance on two novel tests of haptic object recognition ability (n = 66). One test includes complex objects that participants chose to explore with a hand grasp. The other test uses a simpler stimulus set that participants chose to explore with just their fingertips. Only performance on the haptic test with complex stimuli correlated with visual object recognition ability, suggesting a shared source of variance across task structures, stimuli, and modalities. A follow-up study using a visual version of the haptic test with simple stimuli shows a correlation with the original visual tests, suggesting that the limited complexity of the stimuli did not limit correlation with visual object recognition ability. Instead, we propose that the manner of exploration may be a critical factor in whether a haptic test relates to visual object recognition ability. Our results suggest a perceptual ability that spans at least across vision and touch, however, it may not be recruited during just fingertip exploration.

No abstract

No abstract

Visual arts require the ability to process, categorize, recognize, and understand a variety of visual inputs. These challenges may engage and even influence mechanisms that are also relevant for visual object recognition beyond visual arts. A domain-general object recognition ability that applies broadly across a range of visual tasks was recently discovered. Here, we ask whether experience with visual arts is correlated with this domain-general ability. We developed a new survey to measure general visual arts experience and use it to measure arts experience in 142 individuals in whom we also estimated domain-general object recognition ability. Despite our measures demonstrating high reliability in a large sample size, we found substantial evidence (BF 01 = 9.52) for no correlation between visual arts experience and general object recognition ability. This suggests that experience in visual arts has little influence on object recognition skills or vice versa, at least in our sample ranging from low to moderately high levels of arts experience. Our methods can be extended to other populations and our results should be replicated, as they suggest some limitations for the generalization of programs targeting visual literacy beyond the visual arts.