The Power of Touch

Referencing

List: Pye, E. (2016) The Power of Touch. London: Routledge.

In-text: (Pye, 2016, p.)

Quotation
Touch constitutes a genuinely multi-dimensional experience, and our perception of objects consists of an
awareness of both their substance and structural properties. The substance properties of an object involve
such things as its hardness, weight, temperature, and texture, while an object’s structural properties consist of
its size, three-dimensional shape and volume. Our perception of the properties of objects appears to rely on
different parts of the brain. An extensive body of empirical research now shows that visual, auditory, and
olfactory cues can all modulate people’s tactile perception of the substance properties (such as the texture) of
haptically explored objects and surfaces (i.e. explored through active touch). (Pye, 2016, pp. 45-46a)

According to the traditional view, touch was thought to educate vision (see Hooke 1705/1971, 338; Berkeley
1709/1957; Arnold 2003; Classen 2005). However, when psychologists first started to address the question of
how the senses influence each other experimentally they found that vision appeared to dominate touch
completely (e.g. Gibson 1943; Rock & Victor 1964; Rock & Harris 1967). For instance, Gibson (1933, 4-5)
reported that when people ran their fingers up and down a straight meter stick they perceived it as being
curved if they simultaneously looked through lenses that made the stick look curved. As soon as the
participants closed their eyes, however, or turned away, the stick felt straight again. Gibson noted that this
visual dominance over touch (or, more correctly, haptics, i.e. active touch) was so strong that it could not
easily be overridden by instruction. Rock and his colleagues (Rock & Victor 1964; Rock & Harris 1967) reported
a series of experiments in which their participants had to rate their impression of the size of a small object
which they could either see, feel, or both see and feel at the same time. Taken together with other findings
being published around the same time, such as those emerging from prism experiments (e.g. Hay et al. 1965),
Rock and Harris (1967, 96) concluded that, contrary to the traditional view (as expressed by, say, Berkeley
1709/1957; Arnold 2003), 'vision completely dominates touch and even shapes it'. (Pye, 2016, p. 46b)

Various theories have been put forward to try and account for the ubiquity of visual dominance, including the
modality appropriateness hypothesis (i.e. the idea that we rely on the sense that is most adept for a particular
task; Freides 1974; Welch & Warren 1980) and the directed attention hypothesis (Posner et al. 1976).
According to Posner et al's directed attention hypothesis, people tend to direct their attention more towards
the visual sense (in order to compensate for the poor alerting, or arousing, qualities of visual stimuli). This
attentional bias tends to result in attended visual inputs (those sensory impressions on which people are
concentrating) being weighted more heavily than those from the other relatively less attended sensory
modalities (e.g. touch). By contrast, according to the modality appropriateness hypothesis, our brains tend to
favour information from the sense that is most appropriate to the task at hand. According to this view, the
reason why visual information dominates so frequently is simply that vision is the sense that normally provides
the most accurate information concerning the judgement being made (at least for the kinds of perceptual
judgements that psychologists are fond of asking their participants to make). A few exceptions to the
generalization that vision will always dominate over touch have been reported over the years. For example, by
placing a mirror perpendicular to a letter display, Heller (1992) was able to create a situation in which his
participants touched aseries of embossed letters while looking at them in a mirror. Using this set-up, Heller
created a conflict situation whereby, for example, the participants touched the letter 'p' while seeing
themselves in the mirror apparently touching a letter 'b'. The majority of the participants showed tactile
dominance (i.e. they identified the letter in front of them as a 'p' in the above ex-ample). The responses made
by several of the other participants suggested a compromise between the senses, and only one participant
showed visual dominance. Heller accounted for these results in terms of an attentional explanation of sensory
dominance. Researchers investigating the multisensory perception of surface texture have shown that both
vision and touch appear to contribute to people's perception of the felt texture (or roughness) of a surface
(see Lederman & Klatsky 2004 for a review). For example, Lederman and Abbott (1981) reported that
participants made compromise judgements when vision and touch were put into conflict, their results
suggesting that participants weighted the two modalities about equally (see also Guest & Spence 2003b). (Pye,
2016, p. 47)

Guest and Spence (2007) recently reported a study in which touch was shown to exert a greater influence over
participants' judgements of the surface texture of fabric samples than did visual texture cues.
Participants had to discriminate between pairs of pilled fabric samples using touch, vision, or both senses
together. (Pilling results from the abrading of a fabric's surface through wear.) The participants were able to
discriminate between the pilled fabric samples more accurately using touch alone than using only vision. When
fabric samples having slightly different pill values were presented to the participants' eyes and fingertips in the
bimodal condition, the tactile cues were found to completely dominate participants' perception of how pilled
the samples were. These results demonstrate that tactile cues can sometimes dominate over vision in the
perception of fine surface textures. Heller (1989) also reported touch to be superior to vision for judgements
of very smooth textures in an experiment using Japanese abrasive sharpening stones.
While these results might appear to contrast with the numerous previous studies that have reported visual
dominance, Guest and Spence
(2007) argued that their results could also be explained in terms of the modality appropriateness hypothesis
(Freides 1974; Welch & Warren
1980). For, while vision may dominate when people have to make judgements regarding the macrogeometric
properties of an object or surface, touch may dominate when they have to make judgements concerning the
microgeometric properties of a surface (see also Heller
1992; Guest & Spence 2003b). This is consistent with the modality appropriateness hypothesis if one considers
that vision provides more accurate information regarding macrogeometric object properties (structural
properties of the object, or relatively coarse surface texture information) while touch can sometimes provide
more accurate information regarding the microgeometric features (in particular, when trying to discriminate
very fine surface texture). (Pye, 2016, p. 48)