Last Updated on January 13, 2023 by Mike Robinson
There are two main parts to a person’s sense of touch. One of them, the cutaneous or tactile system, uses mechanical and thermal receptors. These receptors are built into the skin to get information about the world around it. The other system is called the haptic system. The haptic system uses the same sensory inputs used by the tactile system. The difference is that the haptic system also gets sensory information from movement receptors in joints, muscles, and tendons. Haptic perception is how humans use this sensory information.
How haptic perception works.
Although other body parts, like the foot and tongue, may also be used for touching, haptic perception is typically performed manually. When using their haptic system, people frequently concentrate on how surfaces, objects, and their characteristics feel (e.g., roughness, compliance, shape, weight, and so on).
People tend to concentrate more on their internal sensations, like pressure, vibration, and warmth, when their tactile system is passively stimulated.
People can accurately and quickly recognize everyday objects through touch. According to research, people manually examine objects with different characteristics to discover their most familiar features.
They use various common hand movements, referred to as “exploratory procedures,” to gather lots of information about the different properties of an object. That is why we are so good at recognizing objects by touching them. Each exploratory method is specific and essential for learning about the characteristics of one or more particular objects.
When do we use haptic perception?
For instance, people usually trace along an object’s edges to learn the most about its shape, squeeze or tap it to feel how soft or hard it is, and lift it away from a surface to gauge its weight. Exploratory procedures vary in several other ways, including which additional properties can be explored simultaneously by the observer, how quickly each one is typically carried out, and which ones can be carried out simultaneously.
These researchers have found that the best exploratory procedures provide precise information, are faster to execute, and have more exploratory procedures than the best exploratory procedures that provide geometric details. The latter provides slow execution and relatively sloppy geometric cues.
How humans use haptic perception.
Researchers have shown that the process we use to explore objects using our senses dramatically influences how we perceive objects and their properties.
First Option
First, people are more likely to pay attention to an object’s material features and less likely to pay attention to its geometric features when they use their sense of touch instead of their sense of sight. This is because exploring an object with touch is more precise and takes less time than exploring an object with sight.
Second Option
Second, haptic information about material properties is usually better than visual information. People sometimes have to tell objects apart visually by inspecting a specific feature. These features could be things such as texture, shape, etc. They are still very likely to touch the object and make decisions based on what they feel.
However, this won’t apply when geometric dimensions are critical to their judgments.
Two more things happen because of other ways in which exploratory procedures work. The third is that people usually evaluate things by hand in a particular order.
Third Option
They begin by grasping the object and exploring it with their hands. These actions provide various bits of information about the object. The person receives and processes this information at the same time. If necessary, this initial step is followed by another one. The next stage is the exploratory procedure, which provides the most useful information about the object.
Fourth Option
In this fourth step, people can reduce the time it takes to learn to identify unfamiliar objects by taking advantage of common properties present on several other similar objects. In order to accomplish this goal, they typically perform multiple exploratory procedures at once,
To do this, the features of the objects have to be similar physically or in the same region of the object. To be able to perform more than one relevant exploratory procedure at once means that observers gain more bang for their buck. Thus, hand movements are critical for effective haptic perception.
Interestingly, the order in which babies learn to feel the different properties of objects matches the order in which they first learn to do the things they need to do to explore.
How we combine our different senses.
People also often use their sense of touch in combination with other senses, like seeing or hearing. How do they then coordinate all of these different sources of information?
For shared properties, like the 2-D geometry found in braille, the sensory inputs are first processed by the less effective method, which is haptics. Then these inputs can be used by the more appropriate method for this situation: vision.
For other properties, like 3D shape and texture, both sources of information can be used, and the reliability of the information from each can be taken into account.
People rely more on visual information when using both methods to determine an object’s geometry (e.g., size and shape). On the other hand, when using both methods to decide about an object’s surface roughness, people tend to give more weight to the haptic information.
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Conclusion:
The desire to investigate, scrutinize, and manipulate objects with our hands for the sake of discovery is one of the defining characteristics of human behavior. In actuality, we regularly use haptic perception. Your sense of touch is just as common as your vision. Whether you’re following the contours of a wooden table or moving your hand across a soft area rug. Another example is enclosing your hand over a coffee mug handle. And we’ve all had to squeeze a baby’s diaper to determine whether it needs changing. Haptic perception is how we see with our hands, a skill that begins to develop at a young age.
