Abstract
People vary in their ability to recognize objects visually. Individual differences for matching and recognizing objects visually is supported by a domain-general ability capturing common variance across different tasks (e.g., Richler et al., Psychological Review, 126, 226–251, 2019). Behavioral (e.g., Cooke et al., Neuropsychologia, 45, 484–495, 2007) and neural evidence (e.g., Amedi, Cerebral Cortex, 12, 1202–1212, 2002) suggest overlapping mechanisms in the processing of visual and haptic information in the service of object recognition, but it is unclear whether such group-average results generalize to individual differences. Psychometrically validated measures are required, which have been lacking in the haptic modality. We investigate whether object recognition ability is specific to vision or extends to haptics using psychometric measures we have developed. We use multiple visual and haptic tests with different objects and different formats to measure domain-general visual and haptic abilities and to test for relations across them. We measured object recognition abilities using two visual tests and four haptic tests (two each for two kinds of haptic exploration) in 97 participants. Partial correlation and confirmatory factor analyses converge to support the existence of a domain-general haptic object recognition ability that is moderately correlated with domain-general visual object recognition ability. Visual and haptic abilities share about 25% of their variance, supporting the existence of a multisensory domain-general ability while leaving a substantial amount of residual variance for modality-specific abilities. These results extend our understanding of the structure of object recognition abilities; while there are mechanisms that may generalize across categories, tasks, and modalities, there are still other mechanisms that are distinct between modalities.
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Availability of data, materials, and code
Reported data, experimental code, analysis code, and test materials for the visual object recognition tests are available in the osf.io repository (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RXG6V). This experiment was not preregistered.
Notes
As these tests are focused on reliably measuring individual differences, the stimulus manipulations across trials are not necessarily equated—some objects appear more than others. Instead, we use stimuli manipulations like viewpoint, size, and the stimuli themselves to increase construct coverage and vary difficulty. These tests were refined with pilot testing by replacing or removing less useful or problem trials to keep the tests as short as possible with good psychometric properties. In the final dataset, every participant took the same set of tests and trials, in the same order.
Note that while many of our tests involve recognizing objects across viewpoint changes, this task is not the same as a mental rotation task, which requires judging whether similar objects have the same handedness or not. Our rotated trials target viewpoint invariance, which is a defining feature of object recognition (Peissig & Tarr, 2007; Gauthier & Tarr, 2016). Indeed, mental rotation and object recognition across viewpoint changes have been dissociated behaviorally (Cheung et al., 2009; Hayward et al., 2006) and they also rely on different neural substrates (Gauthier et al., 2002).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Mel Kacin, Giselle Fiestan, and Cameron Stockwell for help with data collection and recruitment.
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This work was supported by the David K. Wilson Chair Research Fund (Vanderbilt University)
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J.K.C., I.G., and T.J.P. conceptualized the experiment. J.K.C. designed and conducted the experiment. J.K.C. and I.G. wrote the initial draft. J.K.C., I.G., T.J.P. reviewed and edited the final manuscript.
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Chow, J.K., Palmeri, T.J. & Gauthier, I. Distinct but related abilities for visual and haptic object recognition. Psychon Bull Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02471-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02471-x