Where you look can influence haptic object recognition

Abstract

We investigated whether the relative position of objects and the body would influence haptic recognition. People felt objects on the right or left side of their body midline, using their right hand. Their head was turned towards or away from the object, and they could not see their hands or the object. People were better at naming 2-D raised line drawings and 3-D small-scale models of objects and also real, everyday objects when they looked towards them. However, this head-towards benefit was reliable only when their right hand crossed their body midline to feel objects on their left side. Thus, haptic object recognition was influenced by people's head position, although vision of their hand and the object was blocked. This benefit of turning the head towards the object being explored suggests that proprioceptive and haptic inputs are remapped into an external coordinate system and that this remapping is harder when the body is in an unusual position (with the hand crossing the body midline and the head turned away from the hand). The results indicate that haptic processes align sensory inputs from the hand and head even though either hand-centered or object-centered coordinate systems should suffice for haptic object recognition.

Simultaneous Sketching Aids the Haptic Identification of Raised Line Drawings

“…Most studies of the haptic identification of raised line drawings have used shallow lines such as thermoform stimuli. We also used thermoform stimuli but in addition we presented plastic line stimuli which were easier to explore (Lawson, Boylan & Edwards, 2014). People were both faster and more accurate at naming the plastic (26 s, 40% correct) than the thermoform (40 s, 19%) line drawings during the first, exploratory part of the trial.…”

After phrenology: Time for a paradigm shift in cognitive science

“…Additionally, some subcortical structures have been associated with multisensory processing, such as the superior colliculus (Jiang et al 2001), hippocampus (Ravassard et al 2013), and amygdala (De Gelder & Bertelson 2003). Widespread multisensory processing in the brain is responsible for the well-documented interaction of the senses during perceptual (Kawachi et al 2014;Vidal & Barrès 2014) and cognitive tasks (Lawson et al 2014;Pasqualotto et al 2013a). Therefore, the hypothesis that largely overlapping brain networks underlie cognitive and perceptive functions is strongly supported by the findings that "overlapping" brain areas process input from different modalities.…”

The contributions of vision and haptics to reaching and grasping

“…It has been argued that concurrent use of visual and haptic information provides the best means to recognize an object ( Woods and Newell, 2004 ). Many studies have investigated the relationship between these two sensory systems and have demonstrated their interconnectedness at both the behavioral and neural levels ( Reales and Ballesteros, 1999 ; Sadato et al, 2002 ; Norman et al, 2004 , 2008 ; Woods and Newell, 2004 ; Millar and Al-Attar, 2005 ; Held, 2009 ; Volcic et al, 2010 ; Hupp and Sloutsky, 2011 ; Lacey and Sathian, 2011 , 2014 ; Xu et al, 2012 ; Lawson et al, 2013 ; Rognini et al, 2013 ; Wallraven et al, 2014 ; Wesslein et al, 2014 ).…”