The role of motion in haptic and cross-modal object recognition
Poster Presentation

Aisling Whitaker
School of Psychology/Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin

Jason Chan
School of Psychology/Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin

Fiona Newell
School of Psychology/Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin

     Abstract ID Number: 15
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 2, 2007
     Presentation date: 07/05/2007 10:00 AM in Quad Maclauren Hall
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
Recent studies in visual object recognition have found that objects are represented as unique spatiotemporal descriptions in memory. In 1709, however, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley asserted “Motion perceivable by Sight is of a Sort distinct from Motion perceivable by Touch”. Here we investigated whether or not motion is an informative cue for the recognition of objects through touch alone and if this cue allows for efficient cross-modal object recognition. In all our experiments, participants first learned to name a set of 6 novel target objects with movable parts through active touch. Each target consisted of unique shape and motion combinations. In Experiment 1, participants were tested on their recognition of these target objects from a set of objects with either congruent or incongruent shape-motion pairings using touch alone. We found that motion was reliably used as a cue for object recognition in touch. In our second experiment, participants were tested on their recognition of these objects either within or across modalities (i.e. vision). Our results indicate that objects are represented in memory as unique spatiotemporal codes with multisensory access. As such, our findings contradict Berkeley’s original proposal that motion is not shared across the modalities.