Norman J Farley, Clayton Anna Marie, Norman Hideko F, Crabtree Charles E
Department of Psychology, 1906 College Heights Blvd. #21030, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY 42101-1030, USA.
Perception. 2008;37(2):185-96. doi: 10.1068/p5679.
A single experiment was designed to investigate perceptual learning and the discrimination of 3-D object shape. Ninety-six observers were presented with naturally shaped solid objects either visually, haptically, or across the modalities of vision and touch. The observers' task was to judge whether the two sequentially presented objects on any given trial possessed the same or different 3-D shapes. The results of the experiment revealed that significant perceptual learning occurred in all modality conditions, both unimodal and cross-modal. The amount of the observers' perceptual learning, as indexed by increases in hit rate and d', was similar for all of the modality conditions. The observers' hit rates were highest for the unimodal conditions and lowest in the cross-modal conditions. Lengthening the inter-stimulus interval from 3 to 15 s led to increases in hit rates and decreases in response bias. The results also revealed the existence of an asymmetry between two otherwise equivalent cross-modal conditions: in particular, the observers' perceptual sensitivity was higher for the vision-haptic condition and lower for the haptic-vision condition. In general, the results indicate that effective cross-modal shape comparisons can be made between the modalities of vision and active touch, but that complete information transfer does not occur.
设计了一项单一实验来研究知觉学习和三维物体形状辨别。96名观察者通过视觉、触觉或视觉与触觉相结合的方式观察自然形状的固体物体。观察者的任务是判断在任何给定试验中依次呈现的两个物体的三维形状是否相同。实验结果表明，在所有模态条件下，无论是单模态还是跨模态，都发生了显著的知觉学习。观察者的知觉学习量，以命中率和d'的增加为指标，在所有模态条件下都是相似的。观察者在单模态条件下的命中率最高，在跨模态条件下最低。将刺激间隔从3秒延长到15秒会导致命中率增加和反应偏差减小。结果还揭示了两种原本等效的跨模态条件之间存在不对称性：特别是观察者在视觉-触觉条件下的知觉敏感性较高，而在触觉-视觉条件下较低。总体而言，结果表明，可以在视觉和主动触觉模态之间进行有效的跨模态形状比较，但不会发生完整信息传递。
