Visual-tactual and tactual-visual transfer between objects and pictures in 2-month-old infants.

Previous studies have provided evidence for transfer of perception of object shape from touch to vision, but not from vision to touch, in young infants. Previous studies also indicate that intermodal recognition can produce a preference either for a matching or for a nonmatching object. We investigated the causes of asymmetries in intermodal transfer and of conclusions: (i) Transfer from vision to touch is possible under certain conditions and is facilitated by the use of two-dimensional (2-D) visual representations rather than three-dimensional (3-D) visual objects. (ii) The direction of preferences in a transfer task depends on the degree of dissimilarity between the haptically and visually presented objects. Familiarity preferences increase with increasing difference between the object to be recognised and the familiar object. (iii) Infants are able to perceive the 3-D shape of an object both visually and haptically, and they are sensitive both to commonalities and to discrepancies between the shapes of 3-D objects and of their 2-D representations. Hierarchical levels of perceptual processing are proposed to account for these findings.