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Abstract

Prior studies have shown that humans can recognize faces by touch alone. This study investigated haptic face recognition with two experiments using a well-defined stimulus face-space based on the morphable MPI-Face-Database. In Experiment 1, we used an old/new recognition task for which different sets of three faces (out of six) were learned haptically with three subsequent haptic test-blocks and one visual test-block. We found that participants could recognize faces haptically although recognition accuracy was low (65) and tended to decrease across blocks. Cross-modal recognition however was at chance level (48). In Experiment 2, haptic memory was refreshed before each test-block by repeated exposure to the three learned faces. We found that performance increased significantly to 76 and that it became more consistent across blocks. Most importantly, however, we found clear evidence for cross-modal recognition as visual performance rose above chance level (62). Our results demonstrate that during visual face recognition, participants have access to information learned during h aptic exploration allowing them to perhaps form a visual image from haptic information.