Abstract
A variety of similarities between visual and haptic object recognition suggests that the two modalities may share common representations. However, it is unclear whether such common representations preserve low-level perceptual features or whether transfer between vision and haptics is mediated by high-level, abstract representations. Two experiments used a sequential shape-matching task to examine the effects of size changes on unimodal and crossmodal visual and haptic object recognition. Participants felt or saw 3D plastic models of familiar objects. The two objects presented on a trial were either the same size or different sizes and were the same shape or different but similar shapes. Participants were told to ignore size changes and to match on shape alone. In Experiment 1, size changes on same-shape trials impaired performance similarly for both visual-to-visual and haptic-to-haptic shape matching. In Experiment 2, size changes impaired performance on both visual-to-haptic and haptic-to-visual shape matching and there was no interaction between the cost of size changes and direction of transfer. Together the unimodal and crossmodal matching results suggest that the same, size-specific perceptual representations underlie both visual and haptic object recognition, and indicate that crossmodal memory for objects must be at least partly based on common perceptual representations.
Highlights
Visual object constancy is the ability to consistently identify objects despite wide variation in their appearance attributable to such causes as a change in orientation between viewing instances [1]
The results were clear: for both vision and haptics, sequential shape matching was performed faster and more accurately when a given object was presented both times at the same size compared to when it changed size from the first to the second presentation
Though, this difference suggests that visually-encoded representations were more size-sensitive than haptically-encoded representations, so this effect was in the opposite direction to that found in Experiment 1
Summary
Visual object constancy is the ability to consistently identify objects despite wide variation in their appearance attributable to such causes as a change in orientation between viewing instances [1]. They argued that this demonstrated that orientation information is not encoded in the representation underpinning crossmodal recognition This conclusion is not consistent with the results reported by Lawson [4], who used the same sequential matching task and the same 3D plastic models of familiar objects as those used in the present article. If orientation is coded using a reference frame based on the sensor (the eye or the hand) vision and haptics would encode different representations even if the same object was presented to a participant at a fixed position within the environment These differences make it hard to interpret patterns of orientation-sensitivity in unimodal and crossmodal visual-haptic experiments. In Experiment 2, we used the same task and stimuli as in Experiment 1 but participants performed crossmodal VH and HV matching This provided a more direct test of whether the common representations involved in visual and haptic object recognition are size-sensitive
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