Short-term haptic memory for complex objects

Abstract

College students actively felt complex objects for 3 sec, and, after delay intervals of 5, 15, 30, or 45 sec, they received either the same object or a different object for comparison. In a signal detection framework, it was observed that d' scores were significantly higher for the 5-and 15sec intervals than for the 30-and 45-sec intervals. Although a clearly negatively accelerated function was not obtained, this is one of the rare instances in which any decay function has been observed for haptic memory. Although it seems counterintuitive that the entire short-term-memory decay function occupies the narrow band extending from 15 to 30 sec, it is clear from previous studies that short-term haptic memory is unique. Results were discussed in terms of findings in both active-and passive-touch experiments.Invited speakers will include Graham Hitch, Asher Koriat, Michael Pressley, and Wolfgang Schneider. The workshop program will include oral presentations, guest speakers, and poster presentations.The registration fee is 80,000 Italian Liras for participants and 40,000 Italian Liras for students. Payment of the fee should be addressed to PSY.CO 41554/0 Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste, Sede Centrale, Via Cassa di Risparmio 10, 34100 Trieste.

The effect of temporal delay and spatial differences on cross-modal object recognition

“…More interesting, we found that in each modality, there was no effect of interstimulus delay on objects that were more discriminable than on objects that changed on either the x-or y-axis only (Experiment 2). We suggest that interstimulus similarity may affect performance over different delays and that this may explain the inconsistencies in the literature between effects of delay on cross-modal recognition tasks (Garvill & Molander, 1973;Kiphart et al, 1992). Spatial differences, however, interacted with interstimulus intervals in our within-modal experiment only (Experiment 2) and not in our cross-modal experiment (Experiment 1), although changes in xy resulted in better performance in both experiments.…”

“…The tone lasted for 3 sec and on offset, the participants had to remove their hands from the object. Thus, haptic exploration of an object lasted for 3 sec, which was considered adequate time to encode the properties of the object through touch (Kiphart et al, 1992). A visual presentation of a stimulus was preceded by a fixation cross for 500 msec, which alerted the participant and prepared him or her for the subsequent presentation of a visual stimulus.…”

“…For example, Kiphart, Hughes, Simmons, and Cross (1992) found that the haptic memory of complex objects decayed only after a delay of 15 sec (i.e., a decay function similar to that described by Gilson and Baddeley, 1969). In a study on 3-D object recognition in children, Millar (1974, Experiment 2) found that haptic matching performance for nonsense objects was better with interstimulus delays of 1 sec than with delays of 5 and 30 sec, suggesting that haptic memory starts to decay immediately after the exploration of an object.…”

The effects of size changes on haptic object recognition

“…In addition, the haptic condition in Experiment 1 took around 30 min to complete-15 min per block-so perceptual information had to be retained over several minutes. There is evidence that haptic memory of objects alters over time, with some findings suggesting that it decays rapidly, over several seconds (e.g., Kiphart, Hughes, Simmons, & Cross, 1992), but other research suggesting that haptic discrimination and matching may improve over time (Norman, Clayton, Norman, & Crabtree, 2008;Zuidhoek, Kappers, van der Lubbe, & Postma, 2003). The significant recognition advantage when the standard exemplars were presented twice in Experiment 1 demonstrates that durable representations were encoded, but size changes might impair performance more on a short-term matching task than on a longer-term recognition task.…”

Haptic Touch and Hand Ability

“…Other studies report that tactile memory can be sustained for 15 sec (Kiphart, Hughes, Simmons & Cross, 1992) and is vulnerable to articulatory suppression (Mahrer & Miles, 2002). However, performance can also be affected by the task demands or stimulus complexity and the degree of familiarity with the objects being explored (Millar 1981 Newell (2004) suggested that tactile-visual object recognition may rely on modality specific representations.…”