Desmarais Geneviève, Meade Melissa, Wells Taylor, Nadeau Mélanie
Department of Psychology, Mount Allison University, 49A York Street, Sackville, NB, E4L 1C7, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2017 Nov;79(8):2478-2498. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1382-x.
Although some studies have shown that haptic and visual identification seem to rely on similar processes, few studies have directly compared the two. We investigated haptic and visual object identification by asking participants to learn to recognize (Experiments 1, and 3), or to match (Experiment 2) novel objects that varied only in shape. Participants explored objects haptically, visually, or bimodally, and were then asked to identify objects haptically and/or visually. We demonstrated that patterns of identification errors were similar across identification modality, independently of learning and testing condition, suggesting that the haptic and visual representations in memory were similar. We also demonstrated that identification performance depended on both learning and testing conditions: visual identification surpassed haptic identification only when participants explored the objects visually or bimodally. When participants explored the objects haptically, haptic and visual identification were equivalent. Interestingly, when participants were simultaneously presented with two objects (one was presented haptically, and one was presented visually), object similarity only influenced performance when participants were asked to indicate whether the two objects were the same, or when participants had learned about the objects visually-without any haptic input. The results suggest that haptic and visual object representations rely on similar processes, that they may be shared, and that visual processing may not always lead to the best performance.
尽管一些研究表明触觉识别和视觉识别似乎依赖于相似的过程，但很少有研究直接对两者进行比较。我们通过要求参与者学习识别（实验1和3）或匹配（实验2）仅在形状上有所不同的新物体，来研究触觉和视觉物体识别。参与者通过触觉、视觉或双模式探索物体，然后被要求通过触觉和/或视觉识别物体。我们证明，无论学习和测试条件如何，识别错误模式在不同的识别方式中都是相似的，这表明记忆中的触觉和视觉表征是相似的。我们还证明，识别性能取决于学习和测试条件：只有当参与者通过视觉或双模式探索物体时，视觉识别才会超过触觉识别。当参与者通过触觉探索物体时，触觉和视觉识别是等效的。有趣的是，当同时向参与者呈现两个物体（一个通过触觉呈现，一个通过视觉呈现）时，只有当参与者被要求指出这两个物体是否相同时，或者当参与者通过视觉学习物体（没有任何触觉输入）时，物体相似性才会影响性能。结果表明，触觉和视觉物体表征依赖于相似的过程，它们可能是共享的，并且视觉处理并不总是能带来最佳性能。
