Abstract
Thirty-six younger and older adults participated in a cross-modal shape matching task. On any given trial, a participant haptically explored, but could not see, a plastic copy of a bell pepper (Capsicum annuum) for seven seconds; the participant then chose which of 12 simultaneously visible bell peppers possessed the same 3-D shape. Some participants explored the object shapes using only one finger (the index finger), while others used either three or five fingers. Interestingly, there was no effect of the number of fingers upon the participants' shape-matching performance. There was, however, a strong effect of age: the younger adults' performance was 48.6 percent higher than that of the older adults (F(1, 30) = 15.7, p < .001, partial eta-squared = .34). These results (i.e., no effect of the number of fingers) differ from those of Jansson and Monaci (2004, 2006) who found a large difference in performance between the use of one and three fingers for recognizing mostly manmade objects. When perceiving naturally-shaped objects, it appears that one finger is all that is required for accurate haptic-visual shape matching performance.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016