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Abstract:
Prior studies have shown that humans can create a perceptual space of 3D objects that is highly congruent to the physical stimulus space when the underlying stimulus space varies in two different dimensions like global
shape and local texture (Cooke et al., 2006). But what happens if the stimulus space varies in more than two dimensions? And what happens if those dimensions are not as intuitive as "shape" and "texture"? As a first
step to answer these questions, a stimulus space of complex, shell-shaped objects was generated using the mathematical model of Fowler, Meinhardt and Prusinkiewicz (1992) that describes growth parameters of shells. The objects varied in three dimensions each of which controlled a different aspect of its shape. In psychophysical experiments participants viewed pairs of objects and rated the similarity between them. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to calculate the perceptual space. Contrary to
previous experiments, this space showed only little congruency to the physical stimulus space. Additional free categorization and sorting tasks
revealed that humans found it difficult to reconstruct the dimensions of the physical stimulus space. In future experiments, we plan to compare these visual similarity ratings to haptic similarity ratings to study cross modal interaction when a complex three-dimensional stimulus space is explored.
