The effect of task-irrelevant visual information on the memory of haptic scenes
Poster Presentation

Achille Pasqualotto
Department of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, University of Dublin, Trinity College

Fiona N. Newell
Department of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, University of Dublin, Trinity College

Ciara Finucane
Department of Psychology, University of Dublin, Trinity College

     Abstract ID Number: 45
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 16, 2005

Abstract
Does task-irrelevant visual information improve our memory for tactile scenes? We investigated the effects of noninformative vision on haptic memory of layouts of objects arranged in a scene. Using touch alone, participants first learned a scene and were subsequently tested on their recognition of that scene. Participants could either see the surrounding room or were blindfolded. We predicted better recognition when the participants could see the task-irrelevant visual information.
In Experiment 1 we found that noninformative vision improved haptic scene recognition. Moreover, this benefit transferred to the subsequent condition where the participant was blindfolded. In Experiments 2 and 3 we investigated whether wearing a blindfold reduced performance but we found no evidence of this. In Experiment 4 we investigated whether the benefit for noninformative vision again transferred to the blindfolded condition. Here, however, the participant moved to a new environment for the blindfold condition. Unlike Experiment 1, we found no transfer of the effect of noninformative vision on haptic scene recognition performance. Our results suggest that vision provides the reference frame to which haptic scenes are encoded. Noninformative vision enhances recognition performance for haptic scenes provided that the same visual information is available throughout the task.