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Abstract:
Prior studies have shown that humans can recognize faces by touch alone (Kilgour and Lederman, 2002). Here we want to shed further light on haptic face recognition with five experiments using a well-defined stimulus face space based on the morphable MPI-Face-Database. Experiment 1 used a same/different task with sequentially presented faces which established that subjects were able to discriminate faces haptically, using short term memory. In Experiment 2 we used an old/new recognition task to assess whether
participants were able to learn and recognize faces haptically. Moreover, we
addressed the question whether participants were able to generalize information from
haptically learned faces to the visual domain - a question directed at probing the
representation underlying multi-sensory face recognition. In Experiment 3, we changed the design such that haptic memory was refreshed before each test-block by repeated exposure to the three learned faces. In Experiment 4, we interchanged
learning and recognition modality with respect to Experiments 2 and 3, testing withinmodality recognition in the visual domain and cross-modal transfer by haptic
recognition of the face masks. We found that participants were indeed able to learn and recognize small faces haptically, with haptic memory being a crucial factor for recognition performance. Moreover, we found participants to be able to generalize
information from haptically learned faces to the visual domain and vice versa,
however, with a clear advantage for vision as the learning modality. In Experiment 5,
we used a haptic version of the inversion paradigm to study how orientation sensitive
haptic face recognition is and to shed further light on the nature of information
underlying haptic face processing. As we failed to find a haptic face inversion effect,
we suggest that participants rely more on featural than configural information
processing in haptic face recognition.
Finally, we will briefly discuss current experiments that look at size-dependent effects of haptic face recognition.
