Intelligent Exploration by the Human Hand

Humans are remarkably successful at identifying and learning about objects haptically. During the course of haptic object identification, purposive “exploratory procedures” are executed. A variety of factors control the course of haptic object exploration by constraining and influencing the selection of the next exploratory procedure to use. These factors include stored information about objects and their perceptual attributes, associations between exploratory procedures and attributes, and constraints arising from the nature of exploratory procedures themselves. A conceptual model describes such factors and their interactions in object processing.