Visual and Haptic Spaces of Materials C Wiebel, E Baumgartner, K R Gegenfurtner |
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Abteilung Allgemeine Psychologie, Justus-Liebig Universität Giessen, Germany
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| Both the visual and the haptic sense play an important role in the everyday perception of materials. How both senses compare in such tasks has received little attention so far. Previously, Bergmann Tiest & Kappers (2007, Acta Psychologica, 124, 177-189) found a good correspondence between the visual and haptic sense in roughness perception. Here, we set out to investigate the degree of correspondence between the visual and the haptic representations for a large variety of material properties (roughness, elasticity, colorfulness, texture, hardness, three-dimensionality, glossiness, friction, orderliness, temperature) for different material classes (plastic, paper, fabric, fur & leather, stone, metal, wood). We asked subjects to categorize and rate 84 real material samples visually and haptically in separate sessions. Categorization performance was considerably worse in the haptic condition than visually. However, ratings correlated highly between the visual and the haptic modality (average r=0.62 across materials) and showed a similar organization in a principal component analysis. We conclude that even though both senses seem to be able to form similar representations of material classes, the information in the haptic sense alone might not be quite fine-grained and rich enough for perfect material recognition. |
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