Wagner Armin
Institute for Design & Assessment of Technology.
Hist Psychol. 2016 May;19(2):93-104. doi: 10.1037/hop0000028.
James J. Gibson's (1962) now-classic "Observations on Active Touch" demonstrated the superiority of active over passive touch in object discrimination tasks and thereby exposed the paradigmatic limits of preceding research. Before Gibson, according to the received view, the sense of touch had been treated as a mere receptive channel, ignoring the hand's explorative movements. This article challenges this common narrative by juxtaposing Gibson's article with research published in the German-speaking parts of Europe between the early 19th and mid-20th centuries. The concept of "active touch" did not originate from Gibson's paper alone, nor should earlier appearances of the term be treated simply as exceptional cases. On the contrary, throughout the 19th century, the concept facilitated fundamental theoretical, cross-disciplinary discussions and ultimately evolved into an object of experimental study on its own.
詹姆斯·J·吉布森1962年发表的现已成为经典的《关于主动触觉的观察》证明了在物体辨别任务中主动触觉优于被动触觉，从而揭示了先前研究的范式局限性。在吉布森之前，按照传统观点，触觉仅仅被视为一个接收通道，而忽略了手部的探索动作。本文将吉布森的文章与19世纪初至20世纪中叶在欧洲德语区发表的研究并列，对这一常见叙事提出了挑战。“主动触觉”这一概念并非仅源于吉布森的论文，该术语的早期出现也不应仅仅被视为特例。相反，在整个19世纪，这一概念推动了基础理论、跨学科的讨论，并最终自身演变成了一个实验研究对象。
