PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

On the whole, we recognise objects best when we see them from a familiar view and worse from views that were previously occluded from sight. Unexpectedly, we found haptic object recognition to also be viewpoint-specific, even though hand movements were unrestricted. This was due to the hands preferring the back `view‘ of the objects. Furthermore, when the sensory modalities (visual vs. haptic) differed between learning an object and recognising it, we found that recognition performance was best when the objects were also rotated back-to-front between learning and recognition. Our data indicate that the visual system recognises the front view of the objects best whereas the hand recognises the objects best from the back.