General
The main theme of my PhD project is
perception of two-dimensional shapes. This idea is an
extension of the ongoing research on haptic perception of
spatial relations/shape/materials etc. by my supervisor
Astrid Kappers. Since we are at the
physics department, and I am also a physicist, our
main goal is do do psychophysics: studying the
response on physically and mathematically well defined
stimuli. Besides this we are studying what some people
might call 'higher level' processes: haptic perception
of raised line drawings.
Haptic discrimination of angles
To start our
journey in understanding the perception of 2D shape, we
isolated one geometric feature of shape: angular extent. In
a our study found that the acuity with which we can
discriminate two angles is highly dependent on exploration
strategy. Also, both local (information at the apices) and
global (the angular extent itself) affect the
discriminability. This study has been published in
Perception.
Spontaneous exploration strategies and the influence of
size in raised line drawing recognition
Much studies in
haptic perception observe that results are highly dependent
on the way we manually explore stimuli. We did not find
such a variety as Susan Lederman and Roberta Klatzky found
for real 3D objects. Our manuscript recently got accepted
at
Perception.
Look what I've felt: Unidentified haptic line drawings
are identified after sketching.
This study has been
accepted for publication by
Acta Psychologica. In this study we
found out that people who initially could not identify
a line drawing by touch, could suddenly do so after
they were allowed to sketch what they had felt. We
have put additional material on a special web page,
including the database of sketches and some movies of
the real experiment. Additional information is
available through the upper menu bar. Please do not
click 'sketches' if you want to experience the demo's,
it will ruin you in advance because you've already
seen the outcomes.
Curvature contrast in 2D and 3D shapes.
Currently
we are in the middle of performing experiments so I cannot
report more than this nice and appealing title. What I do
have is a nice visual demonstration. Click on this
(
robertsen2) link
and fixate on the black dot. What shape does the purple dot
describe? You can also fixate the purple dot and try to
attend to the shape described by the black dot.
Haptic mental rotation
Together with my colleague
Robert Volcic I am investigating the
old paradigm for the haptic modality.
Haptic perception of real and virtual shapes and the
role of geometric cues
About this project extra
information will be added in the future. It is research I
did with
Vincent Hayward and
Akihiro Sato
