Visual and Haptic Representations of Material Properties

Abstract

Research on material perception has received an increasing amount of attention recently. Clearly, both the visual and the haptic sense play important roles in the perception of materials, yet it is still unclear how both senses compare in material perception tasks. Here, we set out to investigate the degree of correspondence between the visual and the haptic representations of different materials. We asked participants to both categorize and rate 84 different materials for several material properties. In the haptic case, participants were blindfolded and asked to assess the materials based on haptic exploration. In the visual condition, participants assessed the stimuli based on their visual impressions only. While categorization performance was less consistent in the haptic condition than in the visual one, ratings correlated highly between the visual and the haptic modality. PCA revealed that all material samples were similarly organized within the perceptual space in both modalities. Moreover, in both senses the first two principal components were dominated by hardness and roughness. These are two material features that are fundamental for the haptic sense. We conclude that although the haptic sense seems to be crucial for material perception, the information it can gather alone might not be quite fine-grained and rich enough for perfect material recognition.

Exploring Tactile Perceptual Dimensions Using Materials Associated with Sensory Vocabulary

“…While participants have been reported to be able to retrieve similar information through visual and tactile modalities regarding surface roughness (Bergmann Tiest and Kappers, 2007) and three-dimensional shape (Gaissert and Wallraven, 2012), visual and tactile modalities were shown to be related to distinct perceptual properties in a free-sorting task: shape for vision and substances for touch (Klatzky et al, 1987). Another study has shown that material properties primarily obtained through touch (i.e., hardness and roughness) are crucial for material perception, and the interplay between visual and tactile senses is required for precision (Baumgartner et al, 2013). Our brain is known to integrate visual and tactile information when estimating material properties of an object.…”

Perception of the material properties of wood based on vision, audition, and touch

“…Strong emphasis was placed either on visual cues regarding the special density of raised dot patterns, or on tactile cues regarding roughness of the same surfaces. Baumgartner et al (2013) showed that while material categorization performance was less consistent in the haptic condition than the visual one, ratings correlated highly between the two modalities. Overvliet and Soto-Faraco (2011) investigated how vision and touch contribute to the perception of naturalness in wood by comparing four psychophysical measurement methods.…”

“…Previous research on the multimodal perception of material properties has involved the comparison of two modalities, or interactions between two modalities, such as vision and touch (e.g., Baumgartner, Wiebel, & Gegenfurtner, 2013;Lederman, Thorne, & Jones, 1986;Overvliet & Soto-Faraco, 2011), vision and audition (e.g., Fujisaki et al, 2014), audition and touch (e.g., Jousmäki & Hari, 1998;Zampini & Spence, 2005), and vision and action (e.g., Buckingham, Cant, & Goodale, 2009). For example, Lederman et al (1986) demonstrated that the relative weights between vision and touch were considerably altered by directing observers to judge different dimensions of the same textured surface.…”

A comparison of haptic material perception in blind and sighted individuals

“…In a previ- 26 ous study with sighted participants, we had found participants' visual and haptic judgments of material 27 properties to be very similar (Baumgartner, Wiebel, & Gegenfurtner, 2013). In a categorization task, how-28 ever, visual exploration had led to higher categorization accuracy than haptic exploration.…”