Abstract
Visual and haptic unisensory object processing show many similarities in terms of categorization, recognition, and representation. In this review, we discuss how these similarities contribute to multisensory object processing. In particular, we show that similar unisensory visual and haptic representations lead to a shared multisensory representation underlying both cross-modal object recognition and view-independence. This shared representation suggests a common neural substrate and we review several candidate brain regions, previously thought to be specialized for aspects of visual processing, that are now known also to be involved in analogous haptic tasks. Finally, we lay out the evidence for a model of multisensory object recognition in which top-down and bottom-up pathways to the object-selective lateral occipital complex are modulated by object familiarity and individual differences in object and spatial imagery.
INTRODUCTION
Despite the fact that object perception and recognition are invariably multisensory processes in real life, the haptic modality was for a long time the poor relation in a field dominated by vision science, with the other senses lagging even further behind (; ). Two things have happened to change this: firstly, from the 1980s, haptics has developed as a field in its own right; secondly, from the 1990s, there has been an accelerated interest in multisensory interactions. Here, we review the interactions and commonalities in visuo-haptic multisensory object processing, beginning with the capabilities and limits of haptic and visuo-haptic recognition. One way to facilitate recognition is to group like objects together: hence, we review recent work on the similarities between visual and haptic categorization and cross-modal transfer of category knowledge. Changes in orientation and size present a major challenge to within-modal object recognition. However, these obstacles seem to be absent in cross-modal recognition and we show that a shared representation underlies both cross-modal recognition and view-independence. We next compare visual and haptic representations from the point of view of individual differences in preferences for object or spatial imagery. A shared representation for vision and touch suggests shared neural processing and therefore we review a number of candidate brain regions, previously thought to be selective for visual aspects of object processing, which have subsequently been shown to be engaged by analogous haptic tasks. This reflects the growing consensus around the concept of a “metamodal” brain with a task-based organization and multisensory inputs, rather than organization around discrete unisensory inputs (Pascual-Leone and Hamilton, 2001; ; ). Finally, we draw these threads together and discuss the evidence for a model of multisensory visuo-haptic object recognition in which representations are flexibly accessible by either top-down or bottom-up pathways depending on object familiarity and individual differences in imagery preference ().
HAPTIC AND VISUO-HAPTIC OBJECT RECOGNITION
The speed and accuracy of visual object recognition is well-established. Haptic recognition, albeit less well studied, is somewhat slower than visual recognition, but, at least for everyday objects, is still fairly fast and highly accurate with 96% correctly named: 68% in less than 3 s and 94% within 5 s (); indeed, a “haptic glance” of less than 1 s suffices in some circumstances (). Longer response times in the study of likely reflect the time taken to explore some of the larger items such as a tennis racket or hairdryer. A remarkable fact about haptic processing is that it can be achieved with the feet as well as the hands, albeit more slowly and less accurately, with hand and foot performance being highly correlated across individuals (). Haptic identification proceeds, with increasing accuracy, from a “grasp and lift” stage that extracts basic low-level information about a variety of object properties to a series of hand movements that extract more precise information (). These hand movements, known as “exploratory procedures,” are property-specific, for example, lateral motion is used to assess texture and contour-following to precisely assess shape (). These properties differ in salience to haptic processing depending on the context: under neutral instructions, salience progressively decreases in this order: hardness > texture > shape; under instructions that emphasized haptic processing, the order changes to texture > shape > hardness (). Note that the saliency order under neutral instructions is reversed to shape > texture > hardness/size in simultaneous visual and haptic perception, and in haptic perception under instructions to use concurrent visual imagery ().
Overall, cross-modal visuo-haptic object recognition, while fairly accurate, comes at a cost compared to within-modal recognition (e.g., ; ; and see ). Cross-modal performance is generally better when visual encoding is followed by haptic retrieval than the reverse (e.g., ; Streri and Molina, 1994; ). This asymmetry appears to be a consistent feature of visuo-haptic cross-modal memory but has generally received little attention (e.g., ,; Reales and Ballesteros, 1999; Nabeta and Kawahara, 2006). One explanation for cross-modal asymmetry might be that shape information is not encoded equally well by the visual and haptic systems, because of competition from other, more salient, modality-specific object properties. Thus, in the haptic-visual cross-modal condition it might be more difficult to encode shape because of the more salient hardness and texture information, as noted above. This effect might be suppressed by the use of concurrent visual imagery in which shape information, common to vision and touch, might be brought to the fore. We should note, however, that when vision and touch are employed simultaneously, properties that are differently weighted in these modalities may be optimally combined on the basis of maximum likelihood estimates (see ; ; ; Takahashi and Watt, 2014).
Another explanation for cross-modal asymmetry could be differences in visual and haptic memory capacity. Haptic working memory capacity appears to be limited and variable, and may therefore be more error-prone than visual working memory (). Alternatively, haptic representations may simply decay faster than visual representations. Rather than a progressive decline over time, the haptic decay function appears to occur entirely in a band of 15–30 s post-stimulus (). Consistent with this, a more recent study showed no decline in performance at 15 s () although longer intervals were not tested. Haptic-visual performance might therefore be lower because by the time visual recognition is tested, haptically encoded representations have substantially decayed. However, other cross-modal memory studies show that delays up to 30 s (; Woods et al., 2004) or even a week (Pensky et al., 2008) did not affect haptic-visual recognition more than visual-haptic recognition. Thus, an explanation in terms of a simple function of haptic memory properties is likely insufficient.
Cross-modal asymmetry is observed even in very young infants where it is ascribed to constraints imposed by different stages of motor development (Streri and Molina, 1994). But this explanation is also unsatisfactory since the asymmetry persists into maturity (,; ; ). Interestingly, implicit memory does not appear to be affected: cross-modal priming is symmetric (,; Reales and Ballesteros, 1999) although verbal encoding strategies may have played a mitigating role in these studies. A recent study suggests that underlying neural activity is asymmetric between the two crossmodal conditions. Using a match-to-sample task, showed that bilateral lateral occipital complex (LOC), fusiform gyrus (FG), and anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS) selectively responded more strongly to crossmodal, compared to unimodal, object matching when haptic targets followed visual samples, and more strongly still when the haptic target and visual sample were congruent rather than incongruent; however, these regions showed no such increase for visual targets in either crossmodal or unimodal conditions. This asymmetric increase in activation in the visual-haptic condition may reflect multisensory binding of shape information and suggests that haptics – traditionally seen as the less reliable modality – has to integrate previously presented visual information more than vision has to integrate previous haptic information ().
OBJECT CATEGORIZATION
Categorization facilitates recognition and is critical for much of higher-order cognition (); hitherto, the emphasis in terms of perceptual categorization has been almost exclusively on the visual, rather than the haptic, modality. More recently, however, a series of studies has systematically compared visual and haptic categorization. Using multi-dimensional scaling analysis, these studies showed that visual and haptic similarity ratings and categorization result in perceptual spaces [i.e., topological representations of the perceived (dis)similarity along a given dimension] that are highly congruent between modalities for novel 3-D objects (), more realistic 3-D shell-like objects (, , ) and for natural objects, i.e., actual seashells (). This was so in both unisensory and bisensory conditions () and whether 2-D visual objects were compared to haptic 3-D objects (, ) or passive viewing of 2-D objects was compared to interactive viewing and active haptic exploration of 3-D objects, i.e., such that visual and haptic exploration were more similar (). These highly similar visual and haptic perceptual spaces both showed high fidelity to the physical object space [i.e., a topological representation of the actual (dis)similarity along a given dimension; , ], retaining the category structure (the ordinal adjacency relationships within the category, i.e., the actual progression in variation along a given dimension, for example from roughest to smoothest; ). The isomorphism between perceptual (in either modality) and physical spaces was, furthermore, task-independent, whether simple similarity rating (), unconstrained (free sorting), semi-constrained (making exactly three groups) or constrained (matching to a prototype object) categorization (). As in vision, haptics also exhibits categorical perception, i.e., discriminability increases sharply when objects belong to different categories and decreases when they belong to the same category ().
However, visual and haptic categorization are not entirely alike and, consistent with differential perceptual salience (), object properties are differentially weighted depending on the modality, whether they are controlled parametrically () or vary naturally (). Shape was more important than texture for visual categorization whereas in haptic and bisensory categorization, shape and texture were approximately equally weighted (), although in this study shape and texture varied in ways that were intuitive to vision and haptics (broadly, width for shape and smoothness for texture). Using specially manufactured shell-like objects, varied three complex shape parameters that were not intuitive to either modality. While visual and haptic perceptual spaces and the physical object space were all highly similar, the shape dimensions were weighted differently: symmetry was more important than convolutions for vision while the reverse was true for haptics; aperture-tip distance was the least important factor for both modalities (). For natural objects – seashells – that varied naturally in a number of properties, similarity ratings and categorization were still driven by global and local shape parameters rather than size, texture, weight etc. ().
These studies suggest a close connection between vision and haptics in terms of similarity mechanisms for categorization but do not necessarily imply a shared representation because of the differential weighting of object properties in each modality. Nonetheless, there is symmetric cross-modal transfer of category information following either visual or haptic category learning, even for complex novel 3-D objects, and furthermore this transfer generalizes to new objects from these categories (Yildirim and Jacobs, 2013). A recent study shows that not only does category membership transfer cross-modally, as shown by Yildirim and Jacobs (2013), but so does category structure (Wallraven et al., 2013), i.e., the ordinal relationships and category boundaries (see ) transcend modality. Crossmodal transfer of category structure is interesting because the ordering of each item within the category is (at least in the studies reviewed here) perceptually driven; thus it may be that a shared multisensory representation underlies cross-modal categorization, as has been suggested for cross-modal recognition (; ).
Of course, perceptual similarity is not the only basis for categorization (Smith et al., 1998) and neither vision nor haptics appear to naturally recover categories on alternative bases that are more abstract or semantic. For example, used realistically textured models of familiar animals that retained real-life size relations, and required visual and haptic categorization on the basis of size (big/small in real life), domesticity (wild/domestic), and predation (carnivore/herbivore). Errors increased as the basis of categorization moved from concrete (size) to abstract (predation) and were consistently greater in haptics than vision (). Similarly, neither vision nor haptics naturally recovered the taxonomic relationships between the natural seashells used by : participants distinguished between concrete categories such as whether the shells used were flat or convoluted, rather than between abstract categories such as gastropods (e.g., sea-snail) vs. bivalves (e.g., oyster). If biological relationships were recovered at all, this was mainly contingent on shape similarities, although vision was better than haptics in this respect () as it was for the abstract categories studied by .
FACES: A SPECIAL CATEGORY
Faces are a special category of object that we encounter every day and at which we are especially expert, being able to differentiate large numbers of individuals (Maurer et al., 2002). We are also able to recognize faces under conditions that would impair recognition in other categories; for example, bad lighting or changes in viewpoint (Maurer et al., 2002) – though face recognition is impaired if the face is upside-down (Yin, 1969). An important distinction is made between configural and featural processing: the former refers to processing the spatial relationships between individual facial features as well as the shapes of the features themselves, while the latter refers to the piecemeal processing of individual face parts (Maurer et al., 2002; ). Although sighted humans obviously recognize faces almost exclusively through vision, live faces can also be identified haptically with high levels of accuracy (over 70%), whether they are learned through touch alone or using both vision and touch (). Interestingly, when participants had to haptically identify clay masks produced from live faces, accuracy was significantly lower than for live faces, suggesting that natural material cues and surface properties are important for haptic face recognition (). Visual experience may be necessary for haptic face recognition, since the congenitally blind were significantly less accurate than both the sighted and the late-blind (Wallraven and Dopjans, 2013). Nonetheless, haptic face recognition is not as good as visual recognition in the sighted either (). This may be due to basic differences between visual and haptic processing. Haptic exploration of any object is almost exclusively sequential and serial (; Loomis et al., 1991) whilst visual processing is massively parallel (see Nassi and Callaway, 2009). In the context of face processing, therefore, haptics might be restricted to featural processing, in which individual features are processed independently and have to be assembled into a face context, which may account for lower haptic performance compared to visual configural encoding (). When visual encoding was restricted, by using a participant-controlled moving window that only revealed a small portion of the face at a time, so that it was more like haptic sequential processing, visual and haptic performance were more equal (), suggesting that any differences arise from different encoding strategies 1.
Despite these various differences in performance, visual and haptic face processing do have common aspects. For example, consistent with the shared perceptual spaces discussed above (e.g., , , ; ), there is evidence for similar “face-spaces” for vision and touch in which, again, different properties carry different weights depending on the modality (Wallraven, 2014). The evidence for a face-inversion effect – better recognition when faces are upright than inverted, an effect not seen for non-face categories – is clear for vision but less so for haptics. showed a clear haptic inversion effect for faces compared to non-face stimuli, whereas found an inversion effect for unrestricted visual, but not for haptic or restricted visual, face encoding. In “face adaptation,” a neutral face is perceived as having the opposite facial expression to a previously perceived face; for example, adaptation to a sad face leads to perception of a happy face upon subsequent presentation of a face with a neutral expression (e.g., Skinner and Benton, 2010). Such an effect is also seen in within-modal haptic adaptation to faces (Matsumiya, 2012) and transfers cross-modally both from vision to touch and vice versa, indicating that haptic face-related information and visual face processing share some common processing (Matsumiya, 2013).
Faces can also be recognized cross-modally between vision and touch (); this comes at a cost relative to within-modal recognition () although the cost decreases with familiarity (). However, this disadvantage for cross-modal face recognition is unrelated to the encoding modality or to differences in encoding strategies, which suggests that, in contrast to object recognition (see below), vision and touch do not share a common face representation (). On the other hand, visually presented faces disrupt identification of haptic faces when their facial expressions are incongruent and facilitate identification when they are congruent () which suggests a shared representation although response competition cannot be excluded as an explanation for these results. However, taken in conjunction with the finding that a visually prosopagnosic patient (i.e., a patient unable to recognize faces visually despite intact basic visual perception) was also unable to recognize faces haptically (), a shared representation seems likely.
OBSTACLES TO EFFICIENT RECOGNITION
VIEW-DEPENDENCE
A change in the orientation of an object changes the related sensory input, e.g., retinal pattern, such that recognition is potentially impaired; an important goal of sensory systems is therefore to achieve perceptual constancy so that objects can be recognized independently of such changes. Visual object recognition is considered view-dependent if rotating an object away from its original orientation impairs subsequent recognition and view-independent if not (reviewed in Peissig and Tarr, 2007). During haptic exploration, the hands can contact an object from different sides simultaneously: intuitively, therefore, one might expect information about several different “views” to be acquired at the same time and that haptic recognition would be view-independent. However, numerous studies have now shown that this intuition is not correct and that haptic object recognition is also view-dependent (Newell et al., 2001; , ; Ueda and Saiki, 2007, 2012; , ; , ). The factors underlying haptic view-dependence are not currently known: even unlimited exploration time and orientation cuing do not reduce view-dependence (). It is interesting to examine how vision and touch are affected by different types of rotation. Visual recognition is differentially impaired by changes in orientation depending on the axis around which an object is rotated (; ). Recognition is slower and less accurate when objects are rotated about the x- and y-axes, i.e., in depth (Figure 1), than when rotated about the z-axis, i.e., in the picture plane, for both 2-D () and 3-D stimuli (). By contrast, haptic recognition is equally impaired by rotation about any axis (), suggesting that, although vision and haptics are both view-dependent, the basis for this is different in each modality. One possible explanation is that vision and haptics differ in whether or not a surface is occluded by rotation. In vision, a change in orientation can involve not only a transformation in perceptual shape but also occlusion of one or more surfaces – unless the observer physically changes position relative to the object (e.g., Pasqualotto et al., 2005; Pasqualotto and Newell, 2007). Compare, for example, Figures 1A,C – rotation about the x-axis means that the object is turned upside-down and that the former top surface becomes occluded. In haptic exploration, the hands are free to move over all surfaces of an object and to manipulate it into different orientations relative to the hand, thus in any given orientation, no surface is necessarily occluded, provided the object is small enough. If this is true, then no single axis of rotation should be more or less disruptive than another due to surface occlusion, so that haptic recognition only has to deal with a shape transformation. Further work is required to examine whether this explanation is, in fact, correct.
FIGURE 1
View-dependence mostly occurs when objects are unfamiliar. Increasing object familiarity reduces the disruptive effect of orientation changes and visual recognition tends to become view-independent (Tarr and Pinker, 1989;
In contrast to within-modal recognition, visuo-haptic cross-modal recognition is view-independent even for unfamiliar objects that are highly similar (Figure 1), whether visual study is followed by haptic test or vice versa and whatever the axis of rotation (
A strange finding is that knowledge of the test modality does not appear to help achieve view-independence. When participants knew the test modality, both visual and haptic within-modal recognition were view-dependent whereas cross-modal recognition was view-independent (Ueda and Saiki, 2007, 2012), but when the test modality was unknown both within- and cross-modal recognition were view-independent (Ueda and Saiki, 2007). At first glance this is puzzling: one would expect that knowledge of the test modality would confer an advantage. However, Ueda and Saiki (2012) showed that eye movements differed during encoding, with longer and more diffuse fixations when participants knew that they would be tested cross-modally (visual-haptic only) compared to within-modally. It is possible that, on the “principle of least commitment” (Marr, 1976), the same pattern of eye movements occurs when the test modality is not known (i.e., it is not possible to commit to an outcome), preserving as much information as possible and resulting in both within- and cross-modal view-independence. Further examination of eye movements during both cross-modal conditions would be valuable, as eye movements could serve as behavioral markers for the multisensory view-independent representation discussed next.
The simplest way in which cross-modal view-independence could arise is that the view-dependent visual and haptic unisensory representations are directly integrated into a view-independent multisensory representation (Figure 2A). An alternative explanation is that unisensory view-independence in vision and haptics is a precondition for cross-modal view-independence (Figure 2B). In a perceptual learning study, view-independence acquired by learning in one modality transferred completely and symmetrically to the other; thus, whether visual or haptic, within-modal view-independence relies on a single view-independent representation (
FIGURE 2

Alternative models of visuo-haptic view-independence:(A) direct integration of the unisensory view-dependent representation into a multisensory view-independent representation; (B) bisensory view-independence gated by separate, unisensory view-independent representations. Evidence supports the direct integration model (A). Figure adapted from
SIZE-DEPENDENCE
In addition to achieving object constancy across orientation changes, the visual system also has to contend with variations in the size of the retinal image that arise from changes in object-observer distance: the same object can produce retinal images that vary in size depending on whether it is near to, or far from, the observer. Presumably, this is compensated by cues arising from depth or motion perception, accounting for the fact that a change in size does not disrupt visual object identification (
Haptic size perception requires integration of both cutaneous (contact area and force) and proprioceptive (finger spread and position) information at initial contact (
REPRESENTATIONS AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
A crucial question for object recognition is what information is contained in the mental representations that support it. Visual shape, color, and texture are processed in different cerebral cortical areas (
Two kinds of visual imagery have been described: “object imagery” (involving pictorial images that are vivid and detailed, dealing with the literal appearance of objects in terms of shape, color, brightness, etc.) and “spatial imagery” (involving schematic images more concerned with the spatial relations of objects, their component parts, and spatial transformations;
FIGURE 3

(A) Schematic example of Shapes 1 and 2 with (left pair) original texture schemes and (right pair) the texture schemes exchanged. (B) Example of Textures 1 and 2 with (left pair) original shapes and (right pair) the shapes exchanged. Figure adapted from
THE NEURAL BASIS OF VISUO-HAPTIC OBJECT PROCESSING
SEGREGATED VENTRAL “WHAT” AND DORSAL “WHERE/HOW” PATHWAYS
At the macro-level, visual object processing divides along a ventral pathway concerned with object identity and perception for recognition, and a dorsal pathway dealing with object location and perception for action, e.g., reaching and grasping, (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982;
In the case of touch, an early functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study found that haptic object recognition activated frontal cortical areas as well as inferior parietal cortex, while a haptic object location task activated superior parietal regions (Reed et al., 2005). A later study from our laboratory (Sathian et al., 2011) compared perception of haptic texture and location, reasoning that texture would be a better marker of haptic object identity, given the salience of texture to touch (
MULTISENSORY PROCESSING OF OBJECT SHAPE
Cortical areas in both the ventral and dorsal pathways previously identified as specialized for various aspects of visual processing are also functionally involved during the corresponding haptic tasks (for reviews see
The LOC does, however, respond to auditory shape information created by a visual-auditory sensory substitution device (
Apart from the LOC, multisensory (visuo-haptic) responses have also been observed in several parietal regions: in particular, the aIPS is involved in perception of both the shape and location of objects, with co-activation of the LOC for shape and the FEF for location (Stilla and Sathian, 2008; Sathian et al., 2011; see also Saito et al., 2003). The postcentral sulcus (PCS; Stilla and Sathian, 2008), corresponding to Brodmann’s area 2 of primary somatosensory cortex (S1;
Multisensory responses in the LOC and elsewhere might reflect visuo-haptic integration in neurons that process both visual and haptic input; alternatively, they might arise from separate inputs to discrete but interdigitated unisensory neuronal populations. Tal and Amedi (2009) sought to distinguish between these using fMRI adaptation (fMR-A). This technique utilizes the repetition suppression effect, i.e., when the same stimulus is repeated, the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal is attenuated. Since repetition suppression can be observed in single neurons, fMR-A can reveal neuronal selectivity profiles (see
It is critical to determine whether haptic or tactile involvement in supposedly visual cortical areas is functionally relevant, i.e., whether it is actually necessary for task performance. Although research along these lines is still relatively sparse, two lines of evidence indicate that this is indeed the case. Firstly, case studies indicate that the LOC is necessary for both haptic and visual shape perception. A lesion to the left occipito-temporal cortex, which likely included the LOC, resulted in both tactile and visual agnosia even though somatosensory cortex and basic somatosensory function were intact (
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique used to temporarily deactivate specific, functionally defined, cortical areas, i.e., to create “virtual lesions” (Sack, 2006). TMS over a parieto-occipital region previously shown to be active during tactile grating orientation discrimination (Sathian et al., 1997) interfered with performance of this task (Zangaladze et al., 1999) indicating that it was functionally, rather than epiphenomenally, involved. This area is the probable human homolog of macaque area V6 (Pitzalis et al., 2006). Repetitive TMS (rTMS) over the left LOC impaired visual object, but not scene, categorization (Mullin and Steeves, 2011), similarly suggesting that this area is necessary for object processing. rTMS over the left aIPS impaired visual-haptic, but not haptic-visual, shape matching using the right hand (
CATEGORY-SPECIFIC REPRESENTATIONS
There has been rather limited neural study of cross-modal category-selective representations. Using multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data, Pietrini et al. (2004) demonstrated that selectivity for particular categories of man-made objects was correlated across vision and touch in a region of inferotemporal cortex. In the case of face perception, fMRI studies, in contrast to the behavioral studies reviewed above, tend to favor separate, rather than shared representations. For example, visual and haptic face-selectivity in ventral and inferior temporal cortex are in largely separate voxel populations (Pietrini et al., 2004). Haptic face recognition activates the left FG, whereas visual face recognition activates the right FG (
VIEW- AND SIZE-INDEPENDENCE
The cortical locus of the multisensory view-independent representation is currently not known. Evidence for visual view-independence in the LOC is mixed: as might be expected, unfamiliar objects produce view-dependent LOC responses (
Various parietal regions show visual view-dependent responses, e.g., the IPS (
To date, we are not aware of neuroimaging studies of haptic or cross-modal processing of stimuli across changes in orientation.
FIGURE 4

Schematic model of haptic object representation in LOC modulated by object familiarity and imagery type. For unfamiliar more than familiar objects, the LOC is driven bottom-up from somatosensory cortex (S1) with support from spatial imagery processes in the IPS. For familiar more than unfamiliar objects, the LOC is driven top-down from prefrontal cortex (PFC) via object imagery processes. The LOC thus houses an object representation that is flexibly accessible, both bottom-up and top-down, and which is modality- and view-independent (
A MODEL OF VISUO-HAPTIC MULTISENSORY OBJECT REPRESENTATION
Haptic activation of the LOC might arise from direct somatosensory input. Activity in somatosensory cortex propagates to the LOC as early as 150 ms after stimulus onset during tactile discrimination of simple shapes, a timeframe consistent with “bottom-up” projections to LOC (Lucan et al., 2010;
Alternatively, haptic perception might evoke visual imagery of the felt object resulting in “top-down” activation of the LOC (Sathian et al., 1997) and consistent with this hypothesis, many studies show LOC activity during visual imagery. During auditorily cued mental imagery of familiar object shape, both blind and sighted participants show left LOC activation, where shape information would arise mainly from haptic experience for the blind and mainly from visual experience for the sighted (
In this section we describe a model of visuo-haptic multisensory object representation (
We tested this model using analyses of inter-task correlations of activation magnitude between visual object imagery and haptic shape perception (
In our study of spatial imagery (
Figure 4 shows the current version of our model for haptic shape perception in which the LOC is driven bottom-up from primary somatosensory cortex as well as top-down via object imagery processes from prefrontal cortex, with additional input from the IPS involving spatial imagery processes. We propose that the bottom-up route is more important for haptic perception of unfamiliar than familiar objects, whereas the converse is true of the top-down route – more important for haptic perception of familiar than unfamiliar objects. It will be interesting to explore the impact of individual preferences for object vs. spatial imagery on these processes and paths.
SUMMARY
The research reviewed here illustrates how deeply interconnected the visual and haptic modalities are in object processing, from highly similar and transferable perceptual spaces underlying categorization, through shared representations in cross-modal and view-independent recognition and commonalities in imagery preferences, to multisensory neural substrates and complex interactions between bottom-up and top-down processes as well as between object and spatial imagery. Much, however, remains to be done in order to provide a detailed account of visuo-haptic multisensory behavior and its underlying mechanisms and how this understanding can be put to use, for example in the service of neurorehabilitation, particularly for those with sensory deprivation of various sorts.
Statements
Acknowledgments
Support to K. Sathian from the National Eye Institute at the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and the Veterans Administration is gratefully acknowledged.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Footnotes
1.^For discussions of configural versus featural visual face processing, see Peterson and Rhodes (2003).
2.^Note that, although these studies mainly refer to the fusiform gyrus, this is not the only cortical region involved in face processing, nor are faces necessarily the only category processed in that, or other, regions; this issue remains controversial (see
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Summary
Keywords
cross-modal, effective connectivity, fMRI, viewpoint dependence, face processing, visual imagery
Citation
Lacey S and Sathian K (2014) Visuo-haptic multisensory object recognition, categorization, and representation. Front. Psychol. 5:730. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00730
Received
17 February 2014
Accepted
23 June 2014
Published
17 July 2014
Volume
5 - 2014
Edited by
Chris Fields, New Mexico State University, USA (retired)
Reviewed by
Carl M. Gaspar, Hangzhou Normal University, China; Mounia Ziat, Northern Michigan University, USA
Copyright
© 2014 Lacey and Sathian.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Simon Lacey, Department of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine, WMB-6000, 101 Woodruff Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA e-mail: slacey@emory.edu
This article was submitted to Perception Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
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