There's more to touch than meets the eye: The salience of object attributes for haptics with and without vision.

The availability and salience of object attributes under haptic exploration, with and without vision, were assessed by 2 tasks in which Ss sorted objects that varied factorially in size, shape, texture, and hardness. In the directed-discrimination task, Ss were instructed to sort along a particular dimension. Although levels on all dimensions were easily discriminated, shape was relatively less so for haptic explorers without vision, as was hardness for those using vision and haptics. Size was least discriminable for both groups. In the free-sorting task, Ss were to sort objects by similarity. Three groups used haptic exploration only; these were differentiated by the experimenters' definition of object similarity: unbiased haptics, haptically biased haptics, haptics plus visual imagery. A 4th group used vision as well as haptics, with instructions like those of the unbiased haptics group. Results support the contention that the haptic and visual systems have distinct encoding pathways, with haptics oriented toward the encoding of substance rather the shape. This may reflect a direct influence of haptic exploratory procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Active control of locomotion facilitates nonvisual navigation.

In some navigation tasks, participants are more accurate if they view the environment beforehand. To characterize the benefits associated with visual previews, 32 blindfolded participants were guided along simple paths and asked to walk unassisted to a specified destination (e.g., the origin). Paths were completed without vision, with or without a visual preview of the environment. Previews did not necessarily improve nonvisual navigation. When previewed landmarks stood near the origin or at off-path locations, they provided little benefit; by contrast, when they specified intermediate destinations (thereby increasing the degree of active control), performance was greatly enhanced. The results suggest that the benefit of a visual preview stems from the information it supplies for actively controlled locomotion. Accuracy in reaching the final destination, however, is strongly contingent upon the destination's location during the preview. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Haptic integration of planar size with hardness, texture, and planar contour.

Three experiments involving a total of 75 college students investigated the role of size information in haptic classification of custom-made planar objects when size covaries with hardness, texture, or planar contour. Exp 1 showed facilitation of classification by redundant (RD) size and shape cues, indicating the coprocessing of size and shape. Exps 2 and 3 used a withdrawal paradigm: Classification trials began with 2 RD properties, and 1 was then held constant (withdrawn). Exp 2 showed that when size and shape were RD, withdrawal of either impaired responses, whereas when size was RD with texture or hardness, only size withdrawal had an effect. Exp 3 demonstrated that this size weighting was not restricted to a single procedure for exploration. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spatial updating of locations specified by 3-D sound and spatial language.

Blind and blindfolded sighted observers were presented with auditory stimuli specifying target locations. The stimulus was either sound from a loudspeaker or spatial language (e.g., "2 o'clock, 16 ft"). On each trial, an observer attempted to walk to the target location along a direct or indirect path. The ability to mentally keep track of the target location without concurrent perceptual information about it (spatial updating) was assessed in terms of the separation between the stopping points for the 2 paths. Updating performance was very nearly the same for the 2 modalities, indicating that once an internal representation of a location has been determined, subsequent updating performance is nearly independent of the modality used to specify the representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spatial and movement-based heuristics: A reply to S. Millar.

The present authors reply to S. Millar's (see record 1986-08153-001) commentary on their (see record 1986-04159-001) article on spatial and movement-based heuristics by emphasizing that their research points to 2 general conclusions about encoding pattern information haptically. First, haptic encoding makes use of heuristics, and second, the choice of heuristic(s) depends on the particular context within which the encoding occurs. Although the present authors agree with Millar that there are also variations in the data within tasks, they suggest that the broader implications of this work be kept in focus. (2 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experimental psychologists in industry: Perspectives of employers, employees, and educators.

The Task Force on the Employment of Experimental Psychologists in Industry, formed in 1982, conducted 3 surveys to assess the roles of traditionally trained psychologists in nonacademic research settings. The surveyed groups were 209 psychology department chairs, 46 recent recipients of PhDs who had taken nonacademic jobs, and approximately 60 industrial employers at managerial levels. Findings indicate the need for (1) changes in attitude and style in graduate training, (2) course work to relate to industry, (3) increases in internships and practica offered, and (4) strong positive relations between industry and academic psychology. Objectives and recommendations related to needs are offered. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rubbing your stomach while tapping your fingers: Interference between motor planning and semantic judgments.

Previous research (R. L. Klatzky et al, 1989) shows that the time required to make sensible/nonsensible judgments about an action-object phrase (e.g., "rub your stomach") is reliably faster when the phrase is preceded by a cue representing a specific prototypical hand shape (vs a neutral cue). The current experiments investigated the effects of preparing for an alternate task (finger tapping vs syllable vocalization) on facilitatory priming of sensibility judgments. Preparation for finger tapping reduced the magnitude of the priming effect more than preparation for vocalization, suggesting that the resources accessed during semantic processing of action-object phrases are also used during manual response preparation. Results support the existence of a system representing manual actions that is limited in the number of activities that can be represented at one time and that is not so general that it represents manual and vocal tract movements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Curtailing medical inspections in the face of negative consequences.

Inspection curtailment is a reduction in checkups in the face of negative consequences of a potential disease. Participants indicated how frequently inspections to detect a given disease should occur. In Experiment 1, the recommended inspection frequency increased regularly with risk (probability) of disease occurrence but was an inverted U-shaped function of disease severity. Experiments 2–4 separated effects of the cost rate (increase in negative consequences with each interval of occult disease) from the fired cost (unavoidable consequences given even early detection). Increasing the cost rate invariably promoted inspections. Increasing the fixed cost led to reduced inspection frequency when there was little chance of cure and a high cost rate, constituting inspection curtailment. Models to account for inspection curtailment may help to reduce the well-demonstrated everyday undercompliance with health inspection norms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Progrés dans la recherche sur le toucher.

Introduces the special issue on New Directions in Touch, which focuses on a number of critical topics concerning the sense of touch, with invited reviews written by some of the top researchers in the field today. Some of these are traditional topics that have seen impressive advances in recent years, while others are quite new. The intent in highlighting this work is to reflect the increasing excitement in recent years surrounding the exponential increase in highly innovative and diverse research devoted to the sense of touch. There are nine articles in the special issue, covering a wide assortment of topics related to human tactile and haptic sensing and its application, including sensation, perception, cognition and their underlying neural mechanisms, and how basic research on touch has been applied to the design of haptic interfaces for teleoperation and virtual environments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonvisual navigation by blind and sighted: Assessment of path integration ability.

Blindfolded sighted, adventitiously blind, and congenitally blind Ss performed a set of navigation tasks. The more complex tasks involved spatial inference and included retracing a multisegment route in reverse, returning directly to an origin after being led over linear segments, and pointing to targets after locomotion. As a group, Ss responded systematically to route manipulations in the complex tasks, but performance was poor. Patterns of error and response latency are informative about the internal representation used; in particular, they do not support the hypothesis that only a representation of the origin of locomotion is maintained. The slight performance differences between groups varying in visual experience were neither large nor consistent across tasks. Results provide little indication that spatial competence strongly depends on prior visual experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)