Face recognition by hand

We investigated participants' ability to identify and represent faces by hand. In Experiment 1, participants proved surprisingly capable of identifying unfamiliar live human faces using only their sense of touch. To evaluate the contribution of geometric and material information more directly,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Perception & psychophysics 2002-04, Vol.64 (3), p.339-352
Main Authors: KILGOUR, Andrea R, LEDERMAN, Susan J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Biological and medical sciences
Discrimination Learning
Face
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Male
Mental Recall
Multimodal perception
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perception
Perceptual Masking
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychophysics
Sensory Deprivation
Stereognosis
Tactile perception
Transfer (Psychology)
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Summary:We investigated participants' ability to identify and represent faces by hand. In Experiment 1, participants proved surprisingly capable of identifying unfamiliar live human faces using only their sense of touch. To evaluate the contribution of geometric and material information more directly, we biased participants toward encoding faces more in terms of geometric than material properties, by varying the exploration condition. When participants explored the faces both visually and tactually, identification accuracy did not improve relative to touch alone. When participants explored masks of the faces, thereby eliminating material cues, matching accuracy declined substantially relative to tactual identification of live faces. In Experiment 2, we explored intersensory transfer of face information between vision and touch. The findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to haptic object processing and to the face-processing literature in general.
ISSN:0031-5117
1532-5962
DOI:10.3758/BF03194708