Biomedical subjects

Andrew T Woods

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew T Woods.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Visual, haptic and crossmodal recognition of scenes.

Real-world scene perception can often involve more than one sensory modality. Here we investigated the visual, haptic and crossmodal recognition of scenes of familiar objects. In three experiments participants first learned a scene of objects arranged in random positions on a platform. After learning, the experimenter swapped the position of two objects in the scene and the task for the participant was to identify the two swapped objects. In experiment 1, we found a cost in scene recognition performance when there was a change in sensory modality and scene orientation between learning and test. The cost in crossmodal performance was not due to the participants verbally encoding the objects (experiment 2) or by differences between serial and parallel encoding of the objects during haptic and visual learning, respectively (experiment 3). Instead, our findings suggest that differences between visual and haptic representations of space may affect the recognition of scenes of objects across these modalities.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

The effect of temporal delay and spatial differences on cross-modal object recognition.

In a series of experiments, we investigated the matching of objects across visual and haptic modalities across different time delays and spatial dimensions. In all of the experiments, we used simple L-shaped figures as stimuli that varied in either the x or the y dimension or in both dimensions. In Experiment 1, we found that cross-modal matching performance decreased as a function of the time delay between the presentation of the objects. We found no difference in performance between the visual-haptic (VH) and haptic-visual (HV) conditions. Cross-modal performance was better when objects differed in both the x and y dimensions rather than in one dimension alone. In Experiment 2, we investigated the relative contribution of each modality to performance across different interstimulus delays. We found no differential effect of delay between the HH and VV conditions, although general performance was better for the VV condition than for the HH condition. Again, responses to xy changes were better than changes in the x or y dimensions alone. Finally, in Experiment 3, we examined performance in a matching task with simultaneous and successive presentation conditions. We failed to find any difference between simultaneous and successive presentation conditions. Our findings suggest that the short-term retention of object representations is similar in both the visual and haptic modalities. Moreover, these results suggest that recognition is best within a temporal window that includes simultaneous or rapidly successive presentation of stimuli across the modalities and is also best when objects are more discriminable from each other.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Visual, haptic and cross-modal recognition of objects and scenes.

In this article we review current literature on cross-modal recognition and present new findings from our studies on object and scene recognition. Specifically, we address the questions of what is the nature of the representation underlying each sensory system that facilitates convergence across the senses and how perception is modified by the interaction of the senses. In the first set of our experiments, the recognition of unfamiliar objects within and across the visual and haptic modalities was investigated under conditions of changes in orientation (0 degrees or 180 degrees ). An orientation change increased recognition errors within each modality but this effect was reduced across modalities. Our results suggest that cross-modal object representations of objects are mediated by surface-dependent representations. In a second series of experiments, we investigated how spatial information is integrated across modalities and viewpoint using scenes of familiar, 3D objects as stimuli. We found that scene recognition performance was less efficient when there was either a change in modality, or in orientation, between learning and test. Furthermore, haptic learning was selectively disrupted by a verbal interpolation task. Our findings are discussed with reference to separate spatial encoding of visual and haptic scenes. We conclude by discussing a number of constraints under which cross-modal integration is optimal for object recognition. These constraints include the nature of the task, and the amount of spatial and temporal congruency of information across the modalities.

Animals↗