Norman J Farley, Wheeler Sydney P, Pedersen Lauren E, Shain Lindsey M, Kinnard Jonathan D, Lenoir Joel
Department of Psychological Sciences, Ogden College of Science and Engineering, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, USA.
Carol Martin Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science, Bowling Green, KY, USA.
Iperception. 2019 Aug 13;10(4):2041669519870553. doi: 10.1177/2041669519870553. eCollection 2019 Jul-Aug.
A single experiment evaluated the haptic-visual cross-modal matching of solid object shape. One set of randomly shaped artificial objects was used (sinusoidally modulated spheres, SMS) as well as two sets of naturally shaped objects (bell peppers, and sweet potatoes, ). A total of 66 adults participated in the study. The participants' task was to haptically explore a single object on any particular trial and subsequently indicate which of 12 simultaneously visible objects possessed the same shape. The participants' performance for the natural objects was 60.9 and 78.7 percent correct for the bell peppers and sweet potatoes, respectively. The analogous performance for the SMS objects, while better than chance, was far worse (18.6 percent correct). All of these types of stimulus objects possess a rich geometrical structure (e.g., they all possess multiple , , and surface regions). Nevertheless, these three types of stimulus objects are perceived differently: Individual members of sweet potatoes and bell peppers are largely identifiable to human participants, while the individual SMS objects are not. Analyses of differential geometry indicate that these natural objects (e.g., bell peppers and sweet potatoes) possess heterogeneous spatial configurations of distinctly curved surface regions, and this heterogeneity is lacking in SMS objects. The current results therefore suggest that increases in surface structure heterogeneity facilitate human object recognition.
一项实验评估了固体物体形状的触觉 - 视觉跨模态匹配。使用了一组随机形状的人造物体（正弦调制球体，SMS）以及两组自然形状的物体（甜椒和红薯）。共有66名成年人参与了这项研究。参与者的任务是在任何特定试验中通过触觉探索单个物体，随后指出12个同时可见的物体中哪个具有相同的形状。对于自然物体，参与者对甜椒和红薯的识别正确率分别为60.9%和78.7%。对于SMS物体，类似的表现虽优于随机水平，但要差得多（正确率为18.6%）。所有这些类型的刺激物体都具有丰富的几何结构（例如，它们都具有多个[此处原文缺失相关描述]和表面区域）。然而，这三种类型的刺激物体被感知的方式不同：人类参与者在很大程度上能够识别甜椒和红薯的个体成员，而SMS物体的个体则不能。微分几何分析表明，这些自然物体（例如甜椒和红薯）具有明显弯曲的表面区域的异质空间配置，而SMS物体则缺乏这种异质性。因此，当前结果表明表面结构异质性的增加有助于人类物体识别。
