Cognitive Lunch Abstract for February 4

The next Cognitive Lunch will be held Wednesday, February 4.
Time: 12:10-1:10 p.m.
Place: Psychology Conference Room (Room 128)

"Neural Substrates of Visual-Haptic Object Recognition" will be presented by Thomas W. James, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University.

Abstract:
In humans and many other primates, vision plays the major role in object recognition. But, objects can also be recognized by touch. In fact, visual and tactile (or haptic) object recognition systems have in common the ability to recognize and/or represent objects based on their volumetric shape. The object recognition literature, both behavioral and neural, is dominated by studies of vision, so why is haptic object recognition research important? Besides determining the object recognition capabilities of the haptic system itself, studying haptic object recognition also helps constrain theories of object processing in general. Real-world object recognition can be extremely computationally demanding. The primate visual system is not isolated from other perceptual and motor systems; therefore, it is likely that a recognition system would utilize all available evidence, whatever the input modality, to accomplish its task. Studying object recognition using a single input modality overlooks the importance of the integration of inputs. To explore the interplay between visual and haptic inputs for object recognition, we used behavioral, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging techniques. The data from these studies converge to suggest that shared mechanisms for volumetric shape processing across vision and touch are found in the lateral occipital complex and the anterior intraparietal sulcus. Processing of visual-haptic shape in two separate locations suggests that the two visual streams theory may extend to dorsal and ventral streams of visual-haptic shape integration for action and perception.