Transfer of object shape knowledge across visual and haptic modalities

Goker Erdogan, Ilker Yildirim, Robert A. Jacobs

Abstract: We investigate the hypothesis that multisensory representations mediate the crossmodal transfer of shape knowledge across visual and haptic modalities. In our experiment, participants rated the similarities of pairs of synthetic 3-D objects in visual, haptic, cross-modal, and multisensory settings. Our results offer two contributions. First, we provide evidence for a single multisensory shape representation common to both visual and haptic modalities. Second, our analyses suggest that these representations are part-based, representing objects as compositions of subparts.