Adults’ spatial scaling: evidence from the haptic domain

Abstract

The current study investigated adults’ spatial-scaling abilities using a haptic localization task. As a first aim, we examined the strategies used to solve this haptic task. Secondly, we explored whether irrelevant visual information influenced adults’ spatial-scaling performance. Thirty-two adults were asked to locate targets as presented in maps on a larger or same-sized referent space. Maps varied in size in accordance with different scaling factors (1:4, 1:2, 1:1), whereas the referent space was constant in size throughout the experimental session. The availability of irrelevant, non-informative vision was manipulated by blindfolding half of the participants prior to the experiment (condition without non-informative vision), whereas the other half were able to see their surroundings with the stimuli being hidden behind a curtain (condition with non-informative vision). Analyses with absolute errors (after correcting for reversal errors) as the dependent variable revealed a significant interaction of the scaling factor and non-informative vision condition. Adults in the blindfolded condition showed constant errors and response times irrespective of scaling factor. Such a response pattern indicates the usage of relative strategies. Adults in the curtain condition showed a linear increase in errors with higher scaling factors, whereas their response times remained constant. This pattern of results supports the usage of absolute strategies or mental transformation strategies. Overall, our results indicate different scaling strategies depending on the availability of non-informative vision, highlighting the strong influence of (even irrelevant) vision on adults’ haptic processing.

Blindfolded adults use mental transformation strategies for spatial scaling of tactile maps

“…Furthermore, it was shown that blindfolded adults showed a tendency to visualize even non-visual stimuli 31 – 34 . However, previous research on spatial scaling in the haptic domain yielded inconclusive findings 8 – 10 and does not allow to clearly identify specific spatial scaling strategies. Two of these studies did not separate the exploration process from placing the target in the referent space 8 , 9 .…”

“…The majority of previous research on spatial scaling investigated this ability in the visual domain 1 – 7 . However, considering that maps can similarly be encoded using the haptic sense (as done by blind people), recent studies began to investigate spatial scaling in the haptic domain 8 – 10 . A typical procedure in studies investigating scaling was that participants were presented with a simple map showing a target and an empty referent space.…”

“…Up to now, there is one study that met these constraints in the haptic domain, conducted from Szubielska and Möhring 8 . In this respective study, adults were presented with the map and the referent space simultaneously and asked to encode the target location in the map before indicating the same position in the referent space.…”

“…As haptic perception is a sequential process 24 , 25 , exploring the map by touch took longer for larger maps as compared to smaller maps. Consequently, participants’ exploration times interfered with the time used for scaling spatial information, making it difficult to rely on response times as an indicator for scaling per se (for a detailed discussion, see 8 ). Therefore, building on the limitations of this previous research, it seems crucial to separate the exploration process of the map from localizing the target in the referent space.…”

Canonical Size for Real-Word Objects in Drawings Performed under Haptic Control

“…In sighted individuals both haptic and visual recognition are size-dependent (Craddock & Lawson, 2009a, 2009bSzubielska, 2015). In both a tactile domain and a visual domain, enlarging and reducing the size of objects in the mind increases the response time in imagery scaling task, which is a linear function of increasing the change of scale (Szubielska & Bałaj, 2018;Szubielska & Möhring, 2019).…”