Why do four- year- olds show poor cross-modal transfer between haptic and vision?

Why do four- year- olds show poor cross-modal transfer between haptic and vision? Hilary Kalagher (hkalaghe@indiana.edu) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, 1101 E 10 th Street Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Susan S. Jones (jones1@indiana.edu) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, 1101 E 10 th Street Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Abstract Qualitatively different representations Four year olds have difficulty transferring information from the haptic to the visual modality. This difficulty may reflect qualitative differences in haptic and visual object representations or children’s inability to obtain the same kinds of perceptual information in the two modalities. Twenty 4- year-olds explored novel objects either haptically or visually, then haptically chose a match from among three test objects that each matched the exemplar on one perceptual dimension. Children chose shape-based matches after visually exploring category exemplars. However, after haptic exemplar exploration, children were equally likely to pick a shape- or texture-based match. Analysis of children’s hand movements during haptic exploration showed that certain movements reliably predicted shape-based matches. This finding suggests that children have difficulties in cross-modal transfer because their haptic exploration is not driven by a top-down perceptual focus as it is in adults. Keywords: Haptic Development Perception; Cross-modal Transfer; Introduction The use of perceptual information obtained in one modality - for example, haptics – for use in a task in another modality - for example, a visual task - involves cross-modal information transfer. Cross-modal transfer is important because it allows for inter-sensory predictions. For example, being able to anticipate what an object will look like given that you have only touched it allows for efficient and quick interactions with the world. Adults appear to have no difficulty transferring novel information gathered in one perceptual modality for use in a second modality (e.g., Abravanel, 1971, 1973; Easton, Srinivas, & Greene, 1997; Reales & Ballesteros, 1999). However, there are reports that preschool-aged children have difficulty in cross-modal transfer. In particular, children perform poorly in object recognition tasks requiring the transfer of information from haptics to vision. Two explanations for these findings have been proposed. The first proposal is that there are qualitative differences between the representations that children form from visual and haptic experience, so that translation between the two modalities is hampered. The second proposal is simply that young children have poor haptic perception. The present study explores these two possibilities. Bushnell and Baxt (1999) used real-world familiar and novel objects to test 5-year-olds in object recognition requiring either intra- or cross-modal use of haptic or visual information. The children did well in object recognition in intra-modal tasks with both familiar and novel objects, and in cross- modal tasks with familiar objects. Children’s performance was markedly poorer, however, with novel objects. Bushnell and Baxt (1999) suggested that “hand- mages” – representations formed entirely from haptic exploration – differ importantly from visual images (“eye- mages”). They proposed that attention during haptic exploration might be focused on material-based properties (texture, mass, rigidity) whereas in vision attention is focused more on shape and color. These differences in perceptual focus would then presumably lead to qualitatively different representations and therefore poorer performance in cross-modal tasks as compared to intra- modal tasks. Kalagher and Jones (2010) used a novel name extension tasks to test Bushnell and Baxt’s (1999) hypothesis that representations formed through experiences in different modalities are qualitatively different. In the standard version of this task (c.f., Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1988), children are visually presented with a novel object (the exemplar) and told its novel name. Children are then visually presented with three test objects; each matches the exemplar on one perceptual dimension – color, texture, or shape - and differs from the other two test objects on the other perceptual dimensions. Children are asked to indicate the object that has the same novel name as the exemplar. Past experiments have shown that children by 2 years of age typically choose shape-based matches predominately over texture- or color- based matches (e.g., Smith, Jones, Landau, Gershkoff- Stowe, & Samuelson, 2002). This “shape-bias” is thought to reflect an acquired attentional bias. Kalagher and Jones (2010) tested children 2 ½ to 5 years of age and adults in a modified version of this task. Children in their experiment explored exemplar objects either haptically or visually. Test objects were then presented visually. All ages in that experiment chose a preponderance of same-shape matches after visual exemplar exploration. However, only 5-year-