title: A comparison of haptic material perception in blind and sighted individuals.
abstract: We investigated material perception in blind participants to explore the influence of visual experience on material representations and the relationship between visual and haptic material perception. In a previous study with sighted participants, we had found participants' visual and haptic judgments of material properties to be very similar (Baumgartner, Wiebel, & Gegenfurtner, 2013). In a categorization task, however, visual exploration had led to higher categorization accuracy than haptic exploration. Here, we asked congenitally blind participants to explore different materials haptically and rate several material properties in order to assess the role of the visual sense for the emergence of haptic material perception. Principal components analyses combined with a procrustes superimposition showed that the material representations of blind and blindfolded sighted participants were highly similar. We also measured haptic categorization performance, which was equal for the two groups. We conclude that haptic material representations can emerge independently of visual experience, and that there are no advantages for either group of observers in haptic categorization.
authors.affiliation: Abteilung Allgemeine Psychologie, Universität Gießen, Gießen, Germany. Electronic address: elisabeth.baumgartner@psychol.uni-giessen.de.
authors.forename: Elisabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Baumgartner
authors.affiliation: Abteilung Allgemeine Psychologie, Universität Gießen, Gießen, Germany; Modeling of Cognitive Processes Group, Department of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Christiane B
authors.initials: CB
authors.lastname: Wiebel
authors.affiliation: Abteilung Allgemeine Psychologie, Universität Gießen, Gießen, Germany.
authors.forename: Karl R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Gegenfurtner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001766:Blindness / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D013499:Surface Properties; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Haptic perception in blind humans; Material perception; Perceptual space