Exhibition Program

Humans sense spatial patterns through their eyes and hands. Past studies have revealed differences (as well as similarities) between vison and touch in texture processing (e.g., eye is good at detecting texture boundaries, while hand can discriminate subtle texture differences), but the underlying computational differences remain poorly understood. Here we transcribed various textures as surface relief patterns by 3D-printing, and analyzed the tactile discrimination performance regarding the sensitivity to image statistics. We found that visually very different patterns cannot be distinguished by touch if they differ only in higher-order statistics. Human tactile texture processing differs from visual one not only in spatio-temporal resolution but also in (in)sensitivity to higher-order image statistics.