A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Identify the Significance of the Role of Visual Sense in Haptic Sense

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the role of visual sense in haptic sense. Humans recognize the outside world 83.0% by visual sense. From these facts, it should be cleared the significance of visual sense in recognizing the object, and how human combine the stimuli from visual sense and haptic sense to recognize objects. Accordingly, human are able to recognize objects correctly even if they have only the stimuli from either visual sense or haptic sense. Many haptic researches have not utilized complex approaches in recognizing objects. The two cognitive psychological evaluations were conducted in order to compare and assess these two approaches. Both experiments were participated by the same 30 volunteers (age: 21.4±1.6.) An experiment that included haptic sense with objects and an experiment of just visual sense without haptic sense were conducted separately on two days. The binary-test method of fitting goodness was associated with the Wilcox on signed-rank test. The results showed that humans were able to recognize the objects' so-called touch sensation of objects' by visual sense and/or haptic sense. In the absence of haptic memory, human is not able to recognize the objects' haptic sensations of objects' by visual sense. In that case, haptic sense is more essential than all other senses. Also, this study proved that visual sense evoked haptic memory, although its role in recognizing haptic sense was partial.