Haptic perception of two-dimensional shapes and line drawings

Description:
Haptically recognizing raised line drawings is extremely difficult. We are especially interested in the question what makes haptic recognition so difficult. In pilot experiments where we asked observers to draw what they thought they felt, we noticed remarkable differences between the original drawing and the response: straight lines were often drawn (and thus apparently perceived) as curved, straight angles were not drawn as such, topological relations between different parts of the objects were not conserved in the response, etc. The plan is to systematically investigate all kinds of properties of "drawings", such as topological, projective and metrical properties. We will use discrimination and matching tasks as experimental methods. We expect that the results will help us understand what makes these drawings so hard to recognize. Possibly, we can also come up with some sort of "recipe" of how such drawings should be made for optimal performance.

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