Susan J. Lederman, Ph.D.
Lecture Abstract
Feeling Objects, Feeling Faces
The haptic system is a neural system that uses sensory outputs from mechanoreceptors that are embedded in skin, muscles, tendons and joints. Many living organisms use haptics to learn about the concrete world and its properties. In this talk, I will focus on two aspects of my research on human haptics.
First, I will present the results of an extensive series of studies that have addressed the nature and consequences of purposive manual exploration for haptic recognition, classification, and perception of multi-attribute objects. Understanding how humans represent and process the world haptically is also important because the human operator is an integral component of haptic and multimodal interfaces currently being designed for teleoperation and virtual-environment systems. Effective remote sensing and manipulation applications (e.g., e-commerce, remote medical diagnosis, minimally invasive surgery, etc.) require that the design characteristics of the hardware and software systems match the capabilities and limitations of the human operator. I will introduce this area briefly and propose several general design principles based on the results of the scientific studies previously described.
Second, I will describe a new research direction that focuses on haptic face recognition. Contrary to expectation, our initial work has revealed that people are surprisingly effective at recognizing unfamiliar live faces by hand alone. Our subsequent work has focused on several complementary questions: Is face recognition a multimodal phenomenon? What is the nature of haptic face processing? How similar are visual and haptic face processing? I will describe the results of three converging methodological paradigms used to address these questions -- the face-inversion paradigm (behavioural), prosopagnosia (neuropsychology), and fMRI (imaging).
